Page 118 of Almost Always

“How many?” Daisy asked, finally breaking her silence.

Cal smiled. “Hundreds. He really loves you.”

“Always have, always will.” He turned to his son. “Do you still have the letters?”

“Yes. I put them in a different shoebox so you wouldn’t find them.”

Crafty kid. “Can you get them for me?”

Cal nodded and started to go, but stopped and turned to them. “Are you angry with me for taking something that didn’t belong to me?”

The right answer was yes, but he could see the earnestness in his son’s eyes. He could see that he’d done this simply because he thought it would help. So instead of nodding, he shook his head. “No, but I might not be as understanding next time.”

“Okay,” he said softly and charged off, Boots following him down the hall.

Daisy stared at where Cal had been, her eyes wide. “You said you wrote me letters, nothundredsof them.”

“I did say they were like a journal.”

She shook her head. “Your son brought you here because of those letters.”

“I did picture fate a little differently.”

“Raff,” she said softly, a few tears dripping down her cheeks. “This isn’t funny.”

“It’s a little funny, sweetheart.”

She shook her head, swiping at her tears. “This is…I don’t even know how to put into words what all of this is.”

Shifting so he was able to spread his legs out on either side of her, he reached for her hands and drew her eyes to his. “No matter what brought us here or how it came to be, I have never been more glad for a change of scenery.”

“Am I the scenery?”

He laughed softly, cupping her face to bring her closer to him. “You’re the whole damn landscape, Daze.”

She met him halfway, their lips barely brushing when the sound of Cal running broke them apart. He returned with a shoebox and set it between them. Daisy stared at the box and patted her lap. Without hesitation, his son curled up against her.

“Wanna read them to us, hotshot?”

He shook his head at the question, not sure he wanted to revisit a time in his life when he wrote the most romantic things to the woman sitting in front of him. Boots was also settled on the floor, his head resting on Cal’s lap as the three of them watched him.

Realizing they weren’t giving up, he pulled the box towards him and flipped it open. And there, clear as day, were multiple envelopes in different colors, some with only her name, others with her address in Greenville, but not a single one had stamps or any other signs of him ever even attempting to send them. When he first started writing, the letters had been on sheets from a yellow legal pad. He switched to randomly colored paper after that, then wrote on scraps, napkins and even the back of receipts, and still put them into envelopes. Numbering them came much later; he didn’t realize how many he’d written until he started adding the count to the right corner of each envelope.

“Do we have a preference?” he asked.

“What are my choices?”

“I guess you could pick a color.”

She smiled over Cal’s head and pointed. “How about that blue one?”

He picked up the envelope, marked with a number in the two-hundreds, flipped it open and sighed softly. He’d written the letter on a napkin from a diner where he’d sat by himself for hours, building the courage necessary to ask Zara to marry him.

“This is not a good one.”

“Read it to us, Raff,” she urged him softly.

He cleared his throat and smoothed out the flimsy tissue against his thigh and slowly started to read, “Dear Daisy. I’m about to ask my girlfriend to marry me. I feel like I’m betraying you, like I’m cheating on you by being with someone else. But how can that be when we never had anything more than a few years and the best summer of my life? I sometimes lie awake at night and wonder what our lives would have been like had you not left or if I had followed you to Greenville. Do you think we’d love each other? That we would last forever? It’s silly, I know, to think about what could have been, but it’s impossible to not think about you at all.

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