“I’m telling them,” I said. “I won’t let anyone keep saying I turned him away.”
Dewitt slid the bundle closer to me. “You should take your letters.”
I pulled out the pink pages and held them against my chest for a moment. The paper had softened at the folds, and one corner was worn. My daughter watched me put them in my purse.
“Keep the note,” I told Dewitt. “You deserve to decide what to do with it.”
He tucked it back into its envelope. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.”
“You don’t have to decide today.”
My daughter stood beside the table, no longer holding my arm. She looked at the opened envelopes, then at Dewitt.
“I’m sorry I thought this was just about people talking,” she said.
“I know,” I told her. “But the truth is going to talk whether we do or not.”
Dewitt didn’t ask me to stay. I didn’t ask him to come with me. We had both spent too long being told what the other wanted.
At the door, I stopped with my hand on the screen.
“Would you like to have coffee with me sometime?” I asked. “Just coffee. We can talk about what happened, or we can talk about hay.”
His mouth lifted at one corner. “I’d like that.”
“I won’t pretend we’re seventeen again.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to.”
I drove home with the pink letters beside me. My daughter followed in her car. Before I got out, I looked down at the old envelopes, then opened the door and took them inside.
