Page 56 of Anti-Player

“When they were first dating,” Mikel says, breaking the silence, “she wrote him letters.”

I perk up curiously.

He says, “Tons of them. Back and forth. She told me about it one day when I was helping her move some boxes around from their closets to storage. I found the little shoe-box and she laughed at the sight of it. She asked me to keep them somewhere safe, give them to her husband—to my granddad—as a keepsake if something happened to her. I remember rolling my eyes at the idea of their love letters, assuring her nothing would happen to her.”

My heart begins to erode as he explains himself. I know where this is going.

“Paige...” Mikel falters. Jutting out his chin, he stares me down, and I don't need the lights from the window to see the fire in his eyes. “Those letters are personal. They're between him and her, no one else. When I gave the box to him after her funeral, he looked like I'd stabbed him. He was already on the edge of real blindness. He doesn't know that I caught him leafing through those letters, how he began to cry because he couldn't read the gentle, hand-written script from the woman he loved. And he'll never ask anyone to do it for him. Why should he?”

I inhale sharply at the same time he does. His air is all torment, mine is sympathy. “That's why you made the Secret Reader. It's for your grandfather.”

“Yes,” he whispers.

Throwing my arms around him I hold him as tight as I can. He shakes against me, a man tortured by the need to be the savior for someone else. He loves his family. Loves them to the point of risking the ruination of the company that provides the money to live in expensive condos and hire a staff to care for his needs... and the needs of others. It's why he can have Mary insure his grandfather doesn't burn down his house, and why the yard looks perfect with the aid of professional landscapers.

Mikel thinks of nothing but his work.

Nothing but his goals.

Long ago he told me he wanted to help people.

I didn't doubt him.

But I could never understand it, not truly, the way I do now.

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