Love Letters for Other People

Chapter 1

It was one of those nights, the kind on which Nick Thacker needed three things: to work himself to exhaustion, to drown any

surviving discontent with tequila, and to then undo all that hard work by rereading a letter he’d done his damnedest to forget.

He’d already checked the first two items off the list. Nick sat on his bedroom floor, his skin slick with the sweat he’d wrung

from himself at the gym. The metal bedframe dug into his back. A fifth of tequila dangled from his grip.

He sipped. He hated the way the liquor’s fire writhed in his gut—already, he dreaded the price he’d pay tomorrow. But at least

bravery came in liquid form, because he sure as hell didn’t have the courage to unearth the letter on his own. Never mind

that the thing had called to him all day.

Hell, it called to him always.

Usually, he ignored its siren song. At work, he’d brave the blast furnace’s heat as if wading through oil. He’d watch the

glowing iron pour from the hearth until sweat misted his reflective suit and his lungs throbbed in the blistering air. Until

the furnace’s roar subsumed the hungry ache inside him.

But today, that hadn’t been enough. Today, he was going to do something incredibly fucking stupid.

With shaky hands, Nick set aside the tequila and slid a shoebox from beneath his nightstand.

He let a few desperate heartbeats pass by, in case his faulty sense of self-preservation decided to intervene.

But he’d known since this morning that the day would end this way.

On the way to work, he’d caught the tail end of a talk-radio segment while flipping through stations—some guy had called in, confessing that he’d hired a ghostwriter to pen love letters for his girlfriend—and Nick’s fingers had frozen on the dial.

The letter Aubrey had once written, never far from his thoughts, had leapt to the forefront.

It hadn’t left since.

He swallowed and opened the box. He didn’t know which hit harder—the hand-written sheets inside, or the tequila rocketing

through his bloodstream—but the impact made his chest clench, regardless.

He lifted out the letter. The sheer number of times he’d folded and unfolded these pages had reduced the paper to fragile

silk, but seventeen years hadn’t dulled the ostentatiousness of the purple title at the top.

An Inexhaustive List of Things I Love About You.

Nick traced Aubrey’s handwriting. It’d been forty-six days since her words had last stung his eyes. Forty-six days since he’d

vowed to stop doing this to himself. Yet here he sat.

Again.

I love your way with words.

No one writes a love letter like you do, Nick, least of all me.

But here’s my attempt to try, because yours have changed my life.

I’ll never forget the first one I found in my locker.

It was nothing like those awful books we read for English, which are really just some dead guy’s long-winded attempts to sound smart.

No, your words were alive. They shifted the world beneath my feet. And they were all for me.

Please, don’t ever stop writing to me.

Nick dragged a hand down his face. God, had Aubrey ever really loved him like that? With such wholehearted purity?

He tried to feel his way back to that long-dead breath of sunlight, but he couldn’t manage. Probably because, even in high

school, he’d never truly settled into her adoration. He’d known he could never do anything for a girl like that except hold

her back.

People who shone as brightly as Aubrey MacLean didn’t belong in places like Henderson, Indiana.

Good thing, then, that Nick had broken her heart. Good thing Aubrey had left town and never returned. Good thing he hadn’t

seen her in seventeen years and never would again.

Good. Fucking. Thing.

He gulped more liquid flame and thunked the bottle down.

I love that you never back down from a fight.

Not that I approve of guys beating each other up. But you don’t fight for fun. You just stand your ground when your honor

is on the line, and always let the other guy throw the first punch. Then, when you hit back, it’s . . . god, what can I say,

other than ‘beautiful’? I know I’m not supposed to think of it that way. I’m not supposed to lie in bed at night and replay

the way you defended yourself against Gallant on your first day. But I’d never seen anyone fight like that before. So calm.

So focused, like you were completely sure of yourself.

A dark chuckle scorched Nick’s throat. Some things hadn’t changed. He still fought. Daily. He had to, in order to keep the well of words inside him quiet.

He wondered whether Aubrey would still find it beautiful. If she’d seen him and Jackson pummeling each other at the gym earlier,

would she have caught the way Nick funneled his regret into his fists, one punch at a time?

Footsteps sounded. He shoved the letter under the bed, nearly knocking over the tequila in his haste to stand. Thankfully,

the mattress shielded everything from view, because Tansy filled the doorway, dripping rainwater. She fluffed her blond waves,

scattering droplets across the carpet.

“Hey. What’re you doing?” She sounded flat. Bored. Like she didn’t have the faintest interest but had gotten so used to asking

she couldn’t be bothered to do otherwise.

Accurate, really.

“Just taking a breather,” Nick said. “I had a hard day at the mill.”

Her watery blue gaze swept up and down.

He toed Aubrey’s letter under the bed. After six years of separation, Tansy counted as his wife in nothing but name, and he

had no reason to hide. But he would’ve rather stripped naked than let her see, so he schooled his expression to nothingness.

“You’re home late. Where were you?”

She shrugged.

He knew what that meant—she’d been out indulging in one of the flings she would manage to forget before the day ended. Meanwhile,

he’d been holed up in his bedroom like a lovesick teenager, reading a decades-old letter from a girl he’d never deserved.

“Did Paige tell you about her internship?” Tansy said. “There’s a fee.”

Nick tensed. “A fee?”

“Yep. She needs money.”

A headache materialized behind his eyes. “All right. But I’m already pulling overtime at work. Six shifts a week is all they’ll

let me take.”

Tired judgment weighted her gaze. “I’m not asking for me. It’s for our daughter. You know, the one you impregnated me with and agreed to help raise.”

Nick pinched the bridge of his nose, but Tansy was right. She usually was. “Yeah. Okay. How much does she need?”

“Four hundred dollars.”

He nearly choked. “Four hundred? For an internship? I thought Paige was supposed to be working for them, not the other way around.”

She crossed her arms. “This is her ticket to a good college, Nick. It’s the most presumptuous internship in Henderson. So

yeah, it costs money. Like most things.”

“Prestigious,” he corrected, without thinking. “The most prestigious internship in Henderson.”

Tansy huffed. “Whatever.”

Silence hung between them. Nick held her gaze, but his awareness pulsed somewhere low, alongside the letter and liquor he’d

shoved beneath the bed. He imagined he might shove his failings under there, too, and maybe the dull, anxious thud that invaded

his chest whenever he confronted the familiar disdain in Tansy’s eyes.

Two more years. Then the bond they’d forged on the night they’d accidentally made a child together would cease to exist. They

would no longer be bound to each other, or to this house. Yet the weight of the coming years bore down, an ever-present load

on his shoulders.

He cleared his throat. “What happened to the extra three hundred I gave you last week?”

“Gone. It’s not like our refrigerator just fills itself.”

He sighed. But he already knew he’d find the money somewhere. Of course he would. He would lie down in front of a screaming train if it meant getting his daughter into a good college and helping her build the life she wanted. That was why he stayed, after all. Why he did anything.

For Paige. His precious baby girl. His only real family.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll figure it out. Just . . . give me a few days, okay?”

Tansy’s expression didn’t flicker. “Great.”

Without another word, she walked off, leaving him to find a towel and blot the rainwater from the carpet himself.

Later, in the dark, while Tansy snored down the hall, Nick laced his fingers beneath his head and stared at the ceiling. Incessant

rain beat on the shadowed windowpanes.

Four hundred dollars. Where would he find that much on short notice? Maybe he could ask Jackson for a loan—with no family

to support, the guy had managed to accumulate a decent-sized savings—but he hated relying on his best friend.

No, he’d rather handle it himself.

Nick pushed the covers down, then pulled them back up. Why the fuck couldn’t he get comfortable? He contemplated sneaking

to the kitchen for the tequila he’d restashed, then decided against it. Tansy’s interruption of his pity-fest had been well-timed,

and as long as he didn’t drink any more, he could avoid a headache tomorrow.

Aubrey’s letter, though . . . That still lay under the bed, its purple words shining from the pages like lasers, burning holes

through the mattress and gathering into a hot ache in the pit of his stomach.

No one writes a love letter like you do, Nick.

Was that true? Maybe, but only because writing to Aubrey had once come to him as naturally as his own heartbeat. Even now, words smoldered in his belly. Sentences swam in his blood. Paragraphs piled in his rib cage.

Directing them at Tansy had never felt right, so he’d spent seventeen years swallowing them down. Back when he’d first gotten

married, he’d tried bringing his new wife flowers, instead. Fake it ’til you make it, or some shit like that.

The first time, Tansy had tolerated the gesture well enough. She hadn’t thanked him, but she’d arranged the flowers in the

nursery, a welcome gift for the impending baby. When he’d tried again a few months later, though—after her eyes had gone bleary

from lack of sleep and the constant soothing of a colicky newborn—she’d curled her lip, scornful.

“Is this really what we should be spending money on? You could’ve bought another baby bottle, instead. I can’t seem to wash

them out fast enough.”

“I was trying to be romantic,” he’d said, stung. “It’s my way of saying thank you. For everything you’re doing.”

Tansy had made a face, then scooped up a wailing Paige from the baby swing and bounced on the balls of her feet in an effort

to stop the crying. “If you want to be romantic, why don’t you try feeding our kid in the middle of the night? That’d be a

lot more useful than bringing me something that’s going to be dead in a week.”

Her bluntness had shocked him, even though he should have been used to it by then.

But she’d had a point, so Nick had started handling Paige’s midnight feeding himself, at least on the days he hadn’t worked

second or third shift. Even though it had meant concentrating twice as hard at work the next day in order not to topple into

the blast furnace’s volcanic river and incinerate himself.

He’d never brought Tansy flowers again. Now, all these years later, he understood he should never have tried.

The zenith of her interest had already passed, on the night she’d chosen him to distract herself with, for whatever reason.

When he’d been so broken he’d unwittingly chained his future to hers.

Still, for all that, Tansy was a good mother—fiercely loving toward Paige, for which she’d earned Nick’s undying respect.

But her emotional range didn’t extend beyond maternal adoration. Sappy love movies bored her. During their marriage, she’d

forgotten their wedding anniversary every year. And she’d never once told Nick she loved him.

As far as he knew, it had never occurred to her to try.

Meanwhile, he bled inside. He pretended otherwise, mostly for Paige’s sake, and masqueraded through adulthood with his poker

face firmly intact. But in reality?

He felt like a boy, sometimes. Like the scrappy kid from the wrong side of the tracks who’d given his heart away at seventeen

and never gotten it back. Who still boiled with white-hot self-loathing when he thought about hurting a girl he’d once loved

down to the roots of his soul.

Who now spent hours at the gym, silencing the words he still wanted to say to her.

Because if he’d married Aubrey, he would’ve penned her something every day. Spilled ink like so much lifeblood across the

page. He would’ve written about her garnet hair and green eyes, about that look of hers, the one that made him feel like they

were sharing a secret.

His breathing quickened. If only there was some way to alchemize this regret into a way to pay the bills, because lately,

the stacked-up words had begun to fester, as if he’d stuffed his jagged crevices full and had no place else to stash the leftovers.

He’d tried to feed the words to the blast furnace. Sweat them out, punch them out, anything.

But maybe they had another use.

He sat up in the darkness, this morning’s radio segment still heavy in his thoughts. Somewhere, someone was getting paid to ghostwrite love letters. Meanwhile, here he was, overflowing with words he couldn’t say.

He threw the covers back, then crept down the hall on quiet feet, past Tansy’s door to the cramped office, where he flicked

open the sleeping laptop.

He typed a few words into the search engine. Ghostwriting love letters for pay. After scrolling through the results, he sat back. No job postings that he could find, but that didn’t prevent him from trying

on his own, did it?

He navigated to one of those websites where freelancers could offer gigs to the public. After registering for an account,

he typed Nick Thacker’s Love-Letter-Writing Service and pieced together an ad. For four hundred dollars, he would personally craft love letters for someone for up to six months.

He erased the ad, doubtful, then wrote it out again and posted the damn thing. What was the worst that could happen? He shut

the computer and sat amid the muted roar of the rain.

Yet the corrosive heat in his gut gnawed deeper, so instead of going back to bed, he ventured to the front door, then outside.

In the driveway, the chilly autumn downpour assaulted him, more like a hail of bullets than actual rain. He tilted his head

back and gulped the icy droplets. Maybe, on the off chance that someone responded to his ad, he could finally free himself.

Crack open his chest and let the words gush out until the flames died back.

Not that he’d actually be writing to Aubrey. But he could always pretend he was.

Maybe that way, he could finally say goodbye.