Then handed the letter to me.
Her hands were shaking.
Thomas had written that his letters from Boston had repeatedly gone unanswered.
He had assumed Mrs. Parker wanted distance.
Eventually, wounded and embarrassed, he had stopped writing.
Years later, during a conversation with a former school secretary, he learned something strange.
A bundle of letters addressed to Eleanor Parker had once been found behind an old filing cabinet in the school’s front office after a pipe repair.
No one knew how they had ended up there.
Some were returned to sender.
Some disappeared.
Thomas never knew whether any reached her.
“I thought you had chosen not to answer,” he wrote.
“And perhaps you thought the same of me.”
Mrs. Parker sat perfectly still.
Owen whispered, “So neither of you stopped writing?”
“Eventually we both did.”
“But because you thought the other person had.”
“Yes.”
There was no dramatic music.
No gasp from an audience.
