Something about his tone made my heart begin to race. My mind ran in a dozen directions, none of them helpful.
He reached into the drawer and handed me an envelope. My name was written across the front in his careful handwriting. Mattie.
My hands trembled as I opened it.
“This is not about something I did,” he said quietly. “It is about something that has been wrong in the way I have been loving.”
I unfolded the letter and read the first line.
“I do not know how I will survive losing you too, Mattie.”
The words did not feel like a love letter. They felt like a goodbye.
I looked up at him slowly.
“You wrote this about me?”
He did not answer. And in that silence, I understood.
The Truth I Was Not Ready For
My heart ached, not because of what the letter said, but because of how certain it sounded. As if he had already lived through losing me. As if our story had an ending he had written before our beginning had even been allowed to breathe.
