Now, though, she definitely had suspicions.
She found a letter opener, seated herself on the floor, and took out the envelope labeled 1.
She had opened sixteen envelopes from him. Thus far, they’d all said some variant of the same thing: Trust yourself. You can figure out the answer.
Now with the inkling of a suspicion, she slit open the first letter and pulled the paper out.
I’m not sure why you asked me a question, since you clearly know the answer already. Simply do as you think best.
Ha. She set this back in its wrapper and went on to the next one. 2. There’s no need to sound uncertain. Your first impulse was correct. Go with that one.
Just as she’d thought. Next was 3. You’ve got the right idea. Keep going.
On and on she continued, through 13. You’ve made excellent progress; at this point, you understand the matter better than I do, and so I must defer to your superior expertise. Through 27. You don’t need me to tell you what to do. On and on, past 31. I trust your judgment. Her fingers grew colder and colder as she opened them. Half an hour passed while the stack of letters grew around her. She’d not had much of a plan when she started; she had less of one now.
“This is it,” she told envelope number 59 balefully. “If you are going to disprove my hypothesis, it must be you.”
The letter lay innocently in her hand.
“Well?” said a voice behind her. “What is it you expect it to prove?”
Amelia shrieked and turned. She had still been holding on to the letter opener as she did so, and it slipped from her hand and hurtled across the room. She screamed again as it flew through the air, turning, and clattered at Captain Hunter’s feet. She tried to rise, but her leg had somehow fallen asleep in her lengthy letter-opening session. It didn’t quite function any longer; she tripped over it and spilled ignominiously back down on the floor.
Carpet met her nose. She scrunched her eyes shut. Maybe if she never opened them, she would not have to acknowledge what had just happened.
A long silence passed.
Then: “Did you just trip?” he asked. “While sitting down?”
“Impossible,” she muttered into the carpet.
“I had thought so too. Truly I am amazed at all you have accomplished here.”
With immense effort, Amelia managed not to bang her head against the floor in frustration. Slowly, she peeled herself up into a sitting position. “Can we pretend this didn’t happen?”
He picked up the letter opener at his feet and crossed over to set it on her desk.
“What were you doing?”
“I figured it out last night.” She looked at him. “My entire goal these last months was to do so well that you would never have to send me the number for the ‘no, you fool’ envelope.”
“Ah.” He settled himself cross-legged a few feet away from her.
She glared at him. “There is no ‘no, you fool’ envelope.”
He shrugged. “No.”
“How were you supposed to tell me I was a fool?”
“I wasn’t supposed to do it,” he said, “for the reason that you are not a fool and lying is bad.”
She tried to take this concept in, but there wasn’t any place in her head for a thought that seemed so warm. Soft. Comforting.
Her nose wrinkled. “Did you not just see me with the tripping? And the letter opener?”
“Amelia.” He said her name so calmly. After everything that had passed between them last night, it felt too calm. “I asked you to do something that had never been done before. I hired you because I had no idea how to do it. There was nothing I could do to help you but convince you that you were capable of doing it.” His eyes met hers over the vanquished detritus of his letters. “And I was not wrong. You never needed someone to say you were a fool; you do that to yourself far too often. You needed someone to tell you the truth about yourself. And you needed someone to make you believe it.”
She stared at him in confusion. The months of his absence had gone by in what felt like the blink of an eye—so swiftly that she’d scarce had a chance to look at herself or to think about what she had done.
She had gone from I can’t do this to I can, and every time she’d questioned or faltered, his letters had been there to catch her.
Amelia gathered her courage. She inhaled.
“Sorry—” he started to say just as she spoke.
“Thank you,” she said.
They stared at each other.
“Thank you,” she repeated. “This has been good for me. I always thought that I was just, um. Clumsy and odd with a mind that darted around to ridiculous ideas and pushed all sense out of my head.”
“And you’ve discovered that your ideas are not so ridiculous.”
Amelia let out a little laugh. “I note you say nothing about being clumsy and odd.”
“Nobody is perfect.” He smiled at her. There was something weary in his expression. He sighed and looked away. “Speaking of imperfections. Last night, I shouldn’t have kissed you. Or mentioned my feelings. There are often expectations that arise—”
She couldn’t hear this out. “I have none.”
“Listen to me, Amelia. You deserve to expect things from a man who kisses you. I said it last night, but I scarcely allow myself to feel anything anymore. I’ll spend the rest of my life traveling. I can’t spend five days with my mother without knowing how much she resents me for who I’m not.” He looked over at her. “I couldn’t bear it if you grew to resent me too.”
How completely absurd. She shook her head.
“You might say now that you won’t, but—”
“It has been good.” The words spilled out of her. “I don’t want a husband. I had one. I don’t want someone who is constantly expecting. I have had someone who is always there, always demanding, never caring if I’m fine or not. It has been good for me to just…”
She wasn’t sure she would be able to complete her sentence, but the sting of him saying she would resent him…
“I needed to just believe.” She picked up one of his letters at random and waved it in his direction. “This. About myself.”
His eyes shut. “Amelia.”
“I’ve never much wanted children, even though other people told me I would one day. I found marriage stultifying. I can’t tell you what it has done for me, being away from all that. Knowing that I can be this person, and not the woman everyone expected.”
“Amelia.” He hitched forward a few inches, close enough to lean his forehead against her shoulder. He had to curl his head down to reach. She reached out tentatively, touching his head. He arched up into her fingers.
“Grayson Hunter,” she said. “I don’t know about anyone else in our life. But I could never resent you. Not ever.”
His hands clutched her skirts, scrabbling at her knees, but he didn’t lift his head. Time seemed to shift. The tick of the clock on the wall slowed to match the feel of the back of his neck, shaved close but still prickly, against her fingers. She didn’t know what she was doing, what she was asking for.
“I realized,” she told him after a few minutes of silence, “that I could not tell my mother when I wasn’t fine because she preferred to believe I was. Her happiness depends on her belief that she has rescued me. Any sign that she has not feels like a threat. To her, personally.”