Chapter 13 Late Night Letters
Late Night Letters
MADISON
Matthew’s spare room is the kind of quiet you can hear.
Rain needles the roof; the old fridge downstairs hums like it has opinions.
Every time I close my eyes, the night at the farmhouse replays in jump cuts: my voice going sharp, Dylan going still, that horrible moment where I chose distance because staying felt like drowning.
Matthew knocked once after I shut the door. He didn’t come in. He just set a mug on the floorboards and went away, a big man trying to make himself smaller. The mug is chamomile tea with too much honey and it tastes like being forgiven in advance.
I sip it and look at the things he left on the dresser without making a production out of it: a stack of blank stationery, a heavy black pen with a nick in the cap, and a small metal toolbox that used to live under Ray’s workbench.
The toolbox lid is dented from a lifetime of catching the wrong end of a wrench.
Someone’s taped an old label on it in jagged block letters: RAY—SAVE.
I flip the latch. Inside is the neat chaos of a man who never wanted to waste anything—pencils sharpened down to stubborn nubs, a coil of twine, a baggie of mismatched screws, and a folded photo of the farmhouse taken on a winter afternoon when the sky was the exact color of a promise you haven’t made yet.
The pen is heavy in my hand. I sit at the little desk by the window and write like it’s a necessary chore, like feeding the sourdough starter or turning the compost—the kind of tending that looks like nothing until it’s everything.
To Future Us (and Ray, if you’re eavesdropping),
Tonight I left when I wanted to stay. It felt like a betrayal of everything I’ve been saying I’m brave enough to want, which is the worst kind of betrayal—self-canceling. I’m sorry. I am trying to make good choices without making them out of fear.
This is what I want if we’re lucky enough to build it: a farmhouse with the porch light always on and a table that warms from the inside out.
I want seasonal suppers where the menu is whatever the land says yes to that week.
I want one scholarship a year for a local kid who thinks agriculture is a calling and not a box to check.
I want to make a sanctuary for small lives with soft noses and louder needs—goats with escape plans, hens with opinions, calves who get more than a number.
I want us to tell the truth about money and feelings. If a sponsor wants our story, they get our terms. If a post needs to be written, it gets written with dignity or it doesn’t go up. No more mortgaging private grief to pay public bills. This place will not be a content farm. It’s a farm.
I want to keep the parts of me I brought here—the girl who can spin a brand from dust and hustle a spreadsheet until it changes its mind—but I want to be the woman who knows when to close the app and pick up a shovel. I want to be brave enough to be ordinary when ordinary is what a life needs.
If there is an “us” inside this, I want an “us” that argues hard and chooses together. An “us” that doesn’t win at the other person’s expense. An “us” that remembers to laugh when the goats jailbreak, and to stand hand-in-hand when the cottonwoods are the only witnesses.
Legacy is not a plaque; it’s the way a place breathes because you were gentle with it. Let ours be something the soil recognizes.
—M
The letters look too neat. I smudge one on purpose with the side of my hand, then breathe easier at the imperfection. I fold the paper three times, small enough to tuck where I won’t accidentally see it and decide to be brave at the wrong moment.
I put the letter into the toolbox under the coil of twine, then close the lid and slide it back on the dresser. The pen goes on top—Ray’s pen, Matthew said once. “He liked the weight,” Matthew told me. “Said it made his words count.”
My phone face-down on the quilt buzzes with other people’s lives.
I don’t pick it up. Instead I crawl under the blanket that smells faintly of sawdust and soap and the cologne all the men in this town seem to agree upon by secret vote, and I let myself cry very quietly into the edge of the pillow case until my breath slows down enough to sleep.
***
I don’t dream. Or I do and it’s all weather—wind that knocks and asks to be let in. The gray of morning comes as a relief. It’s the kind of dawn that can’t decide if it’s going to rain again, everything bleached and clean and undecided.
Matthew is at the kitchen counter nursing coffee when I pad downstairs, hair in a knot, face swollen. He doesn’t do the kind of looking that makes you feel observed. He slides a mug across the counter instead. “There’s toast if you want toast.”
“Toast is a safe decision,” I say.
He grunts. “Safety’s underrated.” After a beat: “So is showing up.”
“I’m going back.”
“I figured.” He says it like the weather report. “You want me to drive you or you want to pretend I’m not going to do that?”
My laugh surprises both of us. “Drive me. Please.”
He nods, finishes his coffee, cleans his mug like it insulted him. Neither of us mentions the letter or the pen or the toolbox. Neither of us says Dylan’s name out loud like it might spook the moment.
The road between Matthew’s place and the farm is short and long at the same time. We don’t talk the whole way. He hums under his breath in a rhythm that matches the rain on the windshield. When he turns up the lane, the cottonwoods lift into view, all ragged and brave. The porch light is still on.
I grip my letterless hands in my lap. “Do you think—” I start, then stop.
Matthew glances over. “He’s not a man who sleeps when there’s talking to be done.” He pauses, mouth pressed thin. “Not anymore.”
I nod. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For letting me leave without calling me a coward.”
He exhales through his nose, soft and fond. “Kid, if I called everybody a coward who needed a night or two to look themselves in the eye, I’d never shut up.”
He pulls to a stop at the porch steps and puts the truck in park but doesn’t turn it off. “You want me to come in?”
I shake my head yes. “I know we’ve got to do our own talking, but I’d like you to come in to help us stay focused on what the farm needs.”
“Alright, then.” He tips his chin at the house. “Go on, I’ll follow behind.”
The porch boards creak under my boots. The light burns steady in the morning gray, throwing a warm square onto the threshold.
There’s a sticky note on the screen door in Dylan’s blocky handwriting.
It says nothing. It just has an arrow pointing to the handle, like he was thinking of writing please and changed his mind.
I take a breath that feels like an inhale after a long swim and reach for the door.
***
DYLAN
The house is too quiet to be empty. After she left, it took me exactly thirteen minutes to realize silence is its own kind of noise, and exactly fourteen to understand I’d made something worse by the way I tried to make it better.
Ray’s chair has a shape in it that fits a man who believed patience was something you could set down on a table for other people to borrow. I sit there because grief is bossy with its rituals. The Chronicle leans against the salt shaker like we’re waiting on the crossword, not on an apology.
I think about driving after her. I don’t.
The kind of fixing I wanted to do last night would have been a chase, not a choice, and Matthew has a way of answering the door with his whole chest when he thinks a choice needs defending.
So I sat. I cleaned the stovetop like it had offended me. I put a new bulb in the porch light.
Around midnight, I stopped pretending I was going to sleep. The rain came back hard enough to scrub the day. I went into the office to do the kind of paperwork that looks like survival: ledger entries, seed orders, a tattered file folder where Ray wrote PLANS and never used a second sheet of paper.
The pen in the desk drawer is the one Ray used for checks and signatures and to underline in the almanac.
It’s weighted funny, too heavy at the front, like it wants to teach you something about balance.
My hand found it before my head knew why.
I pulled a piece of paper from the printer and started writing because talking had gone about as well as trying to staple wind to a fence.
Ray,
I don’t know where to put this that isn’t inside my chest where it keeps rattling. You were always better at inventory; consider this is me trying.
You left me something I don’t know how to hold without holding too tight. The farm and its work. The part where the work is people. The part where one of those people is a woman who makes the house feel like it’s got a heart beating in it.
I should have said more out loud. I should have said, “She’s not a strategy; she’s a person I care about, and if the folks in town want a story, they can find a better one than ours.
” I should have said, “If there’s a line between protecting the farm and protecting her, I’m going to erase it and start over until we’re both under the same roof.
” I should have told her what I keep telling myself: I was gone on her before my mouth learned the language for it.
Here’s what I’m going to do if I get another swing at this: I’ll make the apology the kind that costs me something.
Not a DM. I’ll say it where it counts, in the daylight, with the coffee burning and the bills on the table.
I’ll sign my name to decisions that affect both of us.
She won’t carry the weight of the story alone.
If the posts get made, they’ll be because we said yes to them, not because we were afraid of saying no.
For the farm: I’ll keep the porch light on.
I’ll mill flour that tastes like something a grandfather would recognize and a kid would ask for seconds of.
I’ll keep graduating fences and building beds and letting the cottonwoods keep their dead so the living have a place to go with their names when they need to.
For the life I want: boots by the door that aren’t all my size. Laughter from the kitchen and the kind of tired that’s earned. Maybe one day small hands slapping dough and, if I'm so lucky, kids who know where their food comes from because they’ve watched the sun draw it out of the ground.
For myself: I’ll speak up when it’s time, even if my voice comes out wrong the first try. I’ll choose together over winning. I’ll stop hiding behind chores when what’s required is courage.
If you’ve got thoughts, I’ll take them. If you don’t, I’ll make do with the ones you already gave me: fix what you can, forgive what you can’t, and if love shows up in work boots, make sure the floor is swept.
—D
I fold the paper and slip it into the middle of Ray’s old ledger between the pages where he kept planting notes and small lectures to himself.
Remember the north field holds water. Don’t put pride where drainage should go.
I slide the ledger on the shelf where I can see it and where I won’t reach for it at the wrong time and decide to be righteous when I need to be careful.
I make coffee. It’s too strong. I leave it that way.
I lay two mugs on the table because hope is a ritual, too.
I write Talk to me on a sticky note and then ball it up and throw it away because begging isn’t the same thing as being brave, and because if she comes back, we’ll both need a little dignity to hold onto.
The rain lightens to a steady hush. It’s still early enough that the birds haven’t voted on a soundtrack. I step onto the porch and flip the switch for the light because I want something to be bright even if the sun isn’t up to the job yet. The bulb hums alive.
I don’t sleep. I put the bread dough on its first rise even though I’m not sure I’ll have a person to eat it with. I straighten chairs that don’t need it. I pace the rectangle right in front of the sink until there’s a path in the mat.
Once, I take the ledger back down and touch the page with my name. I don’t unfold the letter. I don’t need to read the words to know they’re mine.
When tires crunch on gravel, the house inhales. I set the coffee where a hand can find it. I stand on the kitchen side of the doorway like a man who knows doorways get to decide if they’re thresholds or exits.
The porch light throws a square of gold onto the floorboards. The screen door creaks because I never got around to oiling it. Boots on the steps. A shadow on the glass. My own heart doing work it hasn’t had to do in years.
I look up.
The knob turns.
***