There was a fire going in the fireplace that I hadn’t noticed until now, and the scent of cigar smoke grew stronger as I pushed my finger beneath the flap and lifted the top of the envelope. Inside were sheaves of paper all folded together. I swallowed hard when I unfolded it, somehow knowing that whatever was in there would change my life.
‘Hello, dear boy. I hope you’ve found this letter sooner rather than later and that things have all worked out. I’m also writing it in case things haven’t turned out as I hoped. I’m sorry I had to leave you all alone in the world with no family, but hopefully, you and Ellie will one day be making a family of your own.
I’m writing this all here now because I know your stubbornness won’t allow you to come home and talk to me like I’ve asked you to a hundred times. You were wrong, Nick, what you thought of Ellie, and I was very wrong. How you could think the two of us would betray you, I’d never understand, but I guess it’s partly my fault; I handled the whole thing poorly.
I think I should begin at the beginning so you’d understand, and then maybe you’d forgive me for what I have done to your life. I know that it was selfish, but I couldn’t help it. I loved her so much, you see, that there was no other way.’ Loved who? Ellie? I felt the burn of jealousy again as my fingers flexed to crumble the papers, but something held me back, so I carried on.
‘When I was a young man, much younger than you are now, I met a young girl from our town. I’d never seen her before, not until that summer I went away to a music camp. I remember the first time I saw Jan; it was like a bolt of lightning hit me in the chest. I can still remember the way she looked that day, with sunlight in her hair, that doe in headlights look she wore when she saw me standing where she didn’t expect anyone to be.’
I looked away from the letter and into the fire. He could be describing me the day I met Ellie; it was very much as he described, except for the time and place. I’d just arrived not long ago, and she hadn’t been here. I knew of her, of course, since grandpa never stopped going on and on about the niece of a friend that had moved in with him not long after her aunt died.
I remember the hit to the gut when she ran into me on the landing. The way she’d stared at me, or we’d stared at each other. I had no explanation for my odd reaction to her, the way my heart seemed to beat triple time, or how hard my cock got just from that innocent contact when she ran into me.
We’d stood there. I don’t know for how long before either of us spoke, and then I’d smiled at her, and that seemed to release her from the spell. I told her my name, and when I heard her voice for the first time, it was like the sun shone into a hidden place inside. A place no one else had ever entered, before or after. A place I kept under lock and key because I didn’t trust….
I shook my head to erase the thoughts and memories and went back to reading again. ‘I fell in love with her that day at that very moment, and she with me. We spent that whole summer together, getting to know each other. She was unlike anyone I’d ever known, my sweet Jan. Fresh, sweet, innocent, just like our Ellie.
After the summer was over, I went back to college. I just knew that I was going to see her again since she lived here in the Hollow, so I stupidly didn’t give her my number, nor did she give me hers. By the time I returned home after the semester, she was gone. I can’t tell you the heartache I felt, the desperation when her mother told me she’d gone away to be married.
Anyway, I buried myself in the business, putting all my energy into that since my heart had no room for anything else. Then I met your grandmother, she was the daughter of a business associate of your great grandfather, and it was kind of an arrangement, I guess you can say.
I never moved back to the Hollow, choosing at the time to head up the field office in New York instead; I couldn’t stand the thought of walking the streets of my childhood home, of maybe running into her someday. Anyway, life went on; I got married and had a child, then when your grandmother was pregnant with your father, we came back here for a visit. That was the first time I saw Jan again after all those years.