Page 9 of Mayflower

You tame it, heal it, and you keep that beast at bay with your gentle fingers and kind gaze.

Wishful kindness—you told me that once.

I think it’s a weapon. I deal with guns, but that might be a stronger one. I can’t buy it. But I can learn how to use it.

You don’t know that, but I can be a good student. With a teacher like you, I can…”

My heart twists at the words. There’s no author and no quotation marks around this passage. Those are the only words on the blank piece of paper. I can only assume these are Raven’s words.

Wishful kindness—I told him that. Does that mean he was writing this… to me?

I set the letter and the notebook aside and pick up the top sheet of paper from the stack in the drawer, Raven’s handwriting on it.

“Marcel Proust said, ‘It’s our imagination that’s responsible for love, not another person.’

That’s bullshit. All those famous people like to throw fancy wordy nonsense around.

YOU are responsible for what happened, Maddy. Only you.

I blame you.

I give you all the credit.

And I thank you.

YOU made it happen, and no matter what happens in the future, there will never be anyone like you. My imagination is not capable of conjuring anything so spellbinding, these feelings… none I’ve ever known before…

It was all you.

Since day one.

Since you put the stethoscope against my heart and said, ‘Hold your breath.’

And I’ve been holding it ever since.”

Tears well up in my eyes. Raven wrote me a letter—no one has ever written one to me.

I pick up another sheet of paper, and a tear drops onto it sloppily as I start reading it.

“To you, Maddy.”

My vision blurs from tears, but I read every word, wiping my wet cheeks, dissipating at the words that talk about life and love and feelings and pain, all of it addressed to me.

The next page is different. It’s the letter M, written multiple times, in even rows, as if someone was perfecting their handwriting.

Then there are words. All starting with M.

I pick up the next page and the next and the next, all of them crowded with that same letter M, words written neatly in some sort of messy meditation in rows and columns.

Milena. Magnetic. Melody. Mouth. Moan. Music.

Maddy. Magic. Moody. Moonlight. Midnight.

Milena.

Mind.

Madness.

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