Page 45 of The Alpha's Pen Pal

“Yeah.”

“What about it?”

“I was just wondering if you ever sent it?” I asked.

“I told you I sent it, baby, remember?”

“Yeah, I just… I don’t know. Being in California just got me thinking about it and—“

“He would have written back if he really wanted to. We talked about this when it happened eleven years ago. He clearly wasn’t really your friend. You just thought he was since you’d never had a real one before.”

I swallowed at her words and bit back the retort on the tip of my tongue. “No, I know, I just…” I paused and peered out my bedroom door towards the letters on the coffee table. “Maybe they got lost?” I suggested.

“All twenty-something of them?” she replied. “I mean, sure, if it had just been one, I could understand that maybe it got lost. But you wrote to him so many times and never got a response. It couldn’t have gotten lost every time.”

The front door opened, and Maya stepped in, holding two large, reusable grocery bags. She looked around the apartment in caution before closing the door.

“Wes?” she mouthed, and I shook my head at her.

“Like I told you then, Haven, I sent it. I sent all of them. He just didn’t care enough to write you back. Don’t you trust me?” my mom asked.

I inhaled and looked down at my feet. I could feel Maya’s eyes on me as she pulled the groceries out of the bags, so I closed the door to avoid her stare.

“Of course I do,” I mumbled, even though my stomach clenched at my words.

“Okay then,” she said. “Now, let’s just leave that awful, awful boy where he belongs—in the past.”

I nodded again. “Okay.”

“Was there anything else you needed?”

“No, that was it,” I whispered. “Bye, Mom.”

“Bye, Haven!” My dad echoed her farewell, and then the line went dead.

I tossed my phone back on the bed. Torn. I felt so… torn. I didn’t know who to believe. Why would he lie to me about not receiving my letter? He’d always been honest with me. Even in his first letter, he was overly honest.

But why would my parents lie about sending it? What would they have gained from cutting me off from my first and only friend?

“Wanna talk about it?” Maya called to me from the kitchen. “I bought wine?”

“It’s 11:00 a.m.,” I said through the door.

“It’s five o’clock somewhere!” she called back to me.

I shook my head with a laugh. “Just give me a minute,” I told her as I perched on the edge of my bed to take my shoes off.

I stretched and wiggled my toes once they were free and sighed at the sensation of no longer having them constricted by the stiff box. I reached for the hole in the sole of my tights to roll them up over my ankles, but then Maya said, “You better not uncover those stinky ballerina feet!”

“I’ll put socks on!”

“It doesn’t help! Wash them or something!”

I groaned and went into the bathroom, quickly washing my feet to appease my roommate and her weirdly sensitive sniffer.

“What’s with the letters?” Maya asked as I joined her in the kitchen, and she handed me a glass of rosé.

“How is this already chilled?” I asked her as I pressed my nose into the glass to sniff it like she taught me.

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