Chapter 24
You’re a fool, and I hope you know it. But I will answer you: Love is what we have already been doing. Every day.
—A letter from Mae Tanner to her husband, Jedidiah Tanner, passed in their own home
C arson turned and walked out of his brother’s house, then drove over to the cabin, because Perry was his person.
He needed her. No matter what. But when he got there, she wasn’t inside.
It was late in the evening, and she wasn’t there.
No purse, no driver’s license. He went into her bathroom and saw that her makeup case wasn’t sitting on the vanity as it had been the nights when he’d stayed here.
Some of her things were still here, but some were definitely packed up. Like she was halfway gone.
On shaking legs, he went into the kitchen.
And he saw them. The stack of letters he’d found in the wall of her house. He picked up one of the letters that had the name Mae written on the front.
Dear Mae,
I’m not a man of words. Even in writing I struggle with them.
But it’s better to do it this way than it is to do it face-toface.
I was a failure of a husband to my wife.
She was a good mother to my children, and I grieve what I could not give her.
I find myself afraid that I won’t be able to give you what you need either.
You have filled this place with so much warmth.
And you have warmed my bed better than anyone.
My body aches for you. But it’s my heart … That’s what I don’t know how to handle.
Your husband,
Jedediah
An eerie echo from the past. Carson had worked on the Victorian.
The house that this couple had lived in a hundred and twenty-five years ago.
They were people, just as he was. And they had worried about the same things he and Perry did.
He had always found comfort in the past because of the way it spoke to how life simply kept going on.
But this … this echo of his own pain was … it was terrifying.
Had men been so frightened of their own hearts through all of history?
He opened up the next letter.
Dear Mae,
I don’t deserve the gift you gave me. Your body.
The sweet words. I couldn’t give them back to you—they froze inside me.
This is not what I want to be. And yet it’s thirty years of habits that I don’t know how to break.
They don’t teach men how to give words to feelings.
They teach us how to build a house, how to hunt for food.
But not this. And I feel like we could all die of starvation because of it. In our souls. Does that make sense?
Yes. It did make sense. He had doubled down on being tough. He had doubled down on being a hero. Because it was better than being a victim. Because it was better than wishing you were dead because you didn’t have your mother.
They don’t teach you how to sit with pain. With your own mistakes. And yet here I am baptized in mine. I might love you, Mae. I’m not rightly sure I know what it means, except the first time that I saw you, I felt you were mine.
Mine.
The first time you touched me, I thought I was going to go up in flames. When you gave me your body, I knew that I wanted to honor it, cherish it like nothing ever before. Maybe that’s love. Will you give me this lifetime to figure that out? Perhaps you can tell me what it is.
Love,
Jedediah
Except Perry wasn’t giving him a lifetime to figure it out. Perry has already given you a lifetime.
The words stung. And he picked up the next letter, the last letter.
Dearest Mae,
I’m writing you this letter twenty years after the last one.
We’ve learned to talk since then. I lived a life before you, but I can barely recall it.
Because my heart began to beat the moment we met.
You taught me to love you, and that was a gift.
I could tell you these words now. I don’t need to write them anymore.
But I like the permanence of putting pen to paper and leaving the mark of my heart behind.
I love you, and I don’t question it. Not in the slightest. I love you, and I know what that means.
Through children, small and now grown. Through life, both happy and sad.
All those vows that they have you say before the preacher, I understand them now.
But I made those vows to another woman, and never really understood.
Not in truth. I understood the struggle of marriage.
I understood the duty of it, but I did not understand the honor.
Now I understand the joy. Of sharing the good and the bad.
Of sharing all that we are. Now I understand that there is no darkness so vast it can swallow up the light of our love.
I do not know why I feared it so. Yes, love is a fearsome thing. With the power to knock my feet out from under me. But without it, I didn’t truly understand what it meant to have my feet beneath me.
It is only by accepting the danger of it, the terror of it, that I have truly learned to live. If the Lord allows me to love you for twenty more years, I will consider it the greatest gift of my life.
Love, your husband,
Jedediah
He stared at that letter. Marveled at its perspective. The things this man had learned in the years between one letter and the next.
There was a lifetime contained between those two letters. Events that Carson himself could only guess at without knowing the whole story. And he realized he didn’t need to.
He realized he was looking for guarantees in places where he couldn’t find them.
And when he couldn’t have those guarantees, he had been looking for safety.
He had been running from the one certain thing, because he knew the power of it.
He was never going to get a guarantee. He was simply going to have to accept that this thing between himself and Perry had always been there.
It had the power to devastate, the power to destroy.
And also the power to let him live a happier life than he had ever before imagined.
There was one last letter there in the stack. But it was not to Mae Tanner.
It was to Carson Wilder. Returned to sender nearly four years ago.
Dear Carson,
When you sent me that letter about how close you came to dying, I thought I was going to die.
I need you with me. I need you to live. I love you.
I love you. You are the most important thing to me.
You have been from the day we met. My hero in every way.
I’m lost without you here. It doesn’t matter how many other men I try to date.
How many I try to care about. I’m afraid you’re the standard.
I’m not sure where that leaves me. Except that I miss you.
And when you come home, I don’t want things to change.
I want us to keep talking like this. I want us to see where this takes us.
Love,
Perry
He felt as if his heart was going to explode. And through the lens of that letter, he saw himself clearly.
He saw what he’d been missing. In his lack of bravery, his unwillingness to risk himself, his heart, he had missed Perry.
Their whole relationship was this unopened letter. She had tried. He had run.
He had to find Perry. He could call her. But he had an inkling of where she might be. And he was going to follow it.