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"She was loyal to a fault, you know." I looked up from the stack of letters in my lap to my mother. She stood in the doorway to my room, a fond look and a soft smile on her face.
The letters had confused me, sealed and labeled, but only one had ever been sent, "RETURN TO SENDER" printed clearly across the envelope.
"Who?"
"Your Great-Aunt Katherine. She's the one who wrote all those letters." She looked down at her feet for a moment. "She loved a girl she and your grandmother used to live across the street from, wrote the letters for her."
"She was... like me?" My gaze dropped back down to the letters, my voice just above a whisper.
My mother sat on the bed next to me and took my hand in hers. "Yes she was. I used to ask her, 'Aunt Katherine, why don't you get married?' My mom would shush me, but Aunt Katherine would laugh and get this look in her eyes." Her eyes moved passed me, lost in the memory. " 'I've got a girl back home,' she'd tell me,' and I'm goin' back to her one day. But she never did."
"What happened?" I whispered the question, unsure if I wanted to know the answer.
"Well, your great-aunt went to college, and the girl- Elizabeth, I think her name was- moved away..." Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head. "It was the strangest thing, too. The family didn't even leave a forwarding address, just there one minute and gone the next. Aunt Katherine didn't find out until the first letter was sent back. She never stopped writing letters, and she never said what she'd written in the first one, beyond that it would change everything for them, forever." My mother looked back at me, and her smile brightened for a moment. "And whenever I asked her, about why that first letter was so important, she simply said, 'We never belonged in that little town, that beautiful girl and me.'"
My fingers traced the letters on the front of the envelope I held. I tried to imagine the great-aunt I'd never met, young and in love, writing out Elizabeth Peters in that elegant cursive. Not yet knowing it would never reach its destination. My mother told me how they'd found out much later that Elizabeth had died during Katherine's second year of college, how Katherine had never stopped writing her letters, and how she had actually written more often after learning that Elizabeth had died.
About half an hour later, I was still sitting on the bed, my mother had left the room, and I realized that none of the letters had ever been read. Katherine's words had been seen by no one but herself. Their story had never been heard, had never seen the light of day.
Taking a deep, shuddering breath, I unsealed the envelope and began to read the letter that would have changed everything, forever.