Eleanor panicked.
She convinced Walter to leave temporarily.
Then she did something Walter did not know.
She wrote the note.
I’ve made my choice. Please don’t look for me.
She slipped it beneath my door.
When I came to Walter’s house, she lied.
Then she intercepted our letters in both directions.
Not forever.
Only for several months.
Long enough.
By the time Walter stopped writing, I believed he had abandoned me.
By the time Eleanor stopped intercepting mine, I had stopped sending them.
Then my father sent me to Columbus.
We disappeared from each other’s lives.
I stared at Eleanor’s confession.
“She kept them?”
Samuel said:
“Apparently.”
“All those years?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I can’t answer that.”
But Eleanor had.
Near the bottom:
I kept the letters because destroying them felt like destroying evidence of what I had done. Keeping them was cowardice too.
I cried.
Not because Walter and I could have married at nineteen.
