He saw her looking around, for Corporal Richard Willows, of course. The tall, blond, handsome soldier whose chin she had stitched after a bar fight two days before Willows shipped out to Vietnam. The soldier she’d had one date with, a walk in Central Park, two years ago. The soldier she believed she’d been corresponding with ever since. The soldier who had died in Edward’s arms during their first week of combat.
As Richard slipped toward death—Edward would never forget this—the man had produced a photograph and two letters from Dr. Elizabeth Collins of New York. As well as a half-completed letter he was writing back to her.
“Tell her,” he begged Edward. “Tell her if I’d had the chance, I know I would have loved her.”
Edward meant to do just that. He barely knew Willows; they had shared a few beers over a game of chess, but that was it. He had sat down at camp that night, shaking and filthy and starving, and attempted a letter breaking the news to Dr. Collins. He had pored over her own two letters to Willows. And that photograph. She was sitting on a picnic blanket. Smiling. Squinting into the sun.
Edward still couldn’t believe what he’d done next.
He lied. He had no beautiful girl to write to back home. Had no hope of correspondence with a wit such as Dr. Elizabeth Collins. He was as lonely as any other soldier, young, and scared, and far too far from home.
He would tell her the truth in the next letter, but first, he’d try Richard Willows on. Just to see what it felt like to write to a woman like that.
Only, Edward never did tell her. And somehow two years passed, and what happened was he wrote to Elizabeth every single day he was at war. He wrote her poetry. He wrote of his childhood and his family. He told her things about himself he’d never told anyone else. He signed them Corporal Richard Willows, feeling sick with guilt—until her next letter came. And then he read her words, hungrily, and the cycle just continued. He was too amazed—by her sense of humor, her intelligence, and her spirit—to stop writing Elizabeth back.
They fell in love.
And now he had to break her heart.
“Dr. Collins,” he said, rising from the table at the chess house. To be so near her after all this time—it made it hard to speak. It made it hard to breathe.
Her eyes settled on him for an instant, then passed on. Of course. She was looking for the man she loved. Not the shorter, dark-haired man before her. It crushed Edward, but he persevered.
“Dr. Collins,” he said again. “You’re here to meet Richard Willows?”
She turned to him again, her beauty overwhelming. “Yes. Who are you?”
“My name is Edward Velevis,” he said, summoning all his courage. “Mr. Willows . . . can’t be here today. He gave me a message for you. I have carried it too long. Will you please sit down?”
Elizabeth sat. She waited. She was quiet. Edward could tell she was alarmed. He must choose now or never to tell her every truth that he’d been hiding.
“Elizabeth, Richard is dead.”
“No,” she gasped. “He can’t be.”
“Richard Willows died on August eighteenth, 1968. I was with him at Camp Faulkner—”
“That’s impossible! He wrote to me only last week. To arrange this meeting. Who are you? Why would you say such a thing?” Elizabeth stood up. She started walking quickly away.
Edward couldn’t let her leave before he told her. “It was a land mine,” he said, following her. “He died in my arms. He asked me to write to you. So I did.”
Something in his tone had reached her, scared her. She turned to him. Each was on the brink of tears. He watched her understand his words. And when she did, her face twisted in horror. She started running.
He chased her like a lunatic. What else could he do? She shouted for him to leave her alone.
“Please,” he begged. It stopped her running and she spun on him. He touched her wrist. A bolt of heat pulsed through him. She looked down as if she felt it, too. But when she met his eyes, hers were daggers.
“How dare you?” she whispered. It broke him in two.
“I know you must hate me. But please know I have loved you for two years. I love you now more than ever. And if you ever change your mind, and want to hear my side of this story, I will be here, right here.” He pointed at the earth beneath his feet.
“You’re going to wait a long time.”
“That’s all right,” he said, and meant it. “I will be here every week. At just this time. In just this place.” He looked down at his watch. “Five-thirty.” He gazed across the park. “At the north side of the Pond, right across from the Gapstow Bridge.” He met her eyes and tried to tell her through them that he loved her.
“However long it takes, Collins. If it means a chance to be with you, I’ll be here every Saturday at sunset for the rest of my life.”
The End
Chapter Eighteen
“I recommend the octopus alla griglia to begin,” says Noa Callaway’s Italian editor when we meet for lunch the next day.
When I emailed Gabriella late last night and asked if we could talk before the launch, she suggested this open-air trattoria on Positano’s sea-facing Via Marina Grande. We’re sitting at a shady corner table with a prime view for people watching.
The scene along Via Marina Grande is the opposite of my hotel terrace vista. Down here, you get the sense of being nestled in the arms of Positano’s craggy coastline, crammed with Technicolor houses stacked into the hills. It’s the kind of cozy beach vibe I’d usually find charming—but today I’m so jittery, it’s making me claustrophobic.
Gabriella studies her menu, unaware of my knees bobbing beneath the table. “And then, the smoked mozzarella tortellini con brodo di parmigiano,” she says. “My six-year-old son calls it ‘cheese soup of the gods.’ ”
I run my finger along the edge of my fork, dig my sandaled toes into the pebbly sand under our table, and listen to the bees buzzing around terra-cotta pots of sunflowers. Ever since last night, I’ve needed touchstones to confirm that this is not a dream, that what I read in Chapter One was real. Real words Noah Ross really typed onto a page. And really sent to me.
It was a code. A not very secret one. A writ large and gorgeous code, illuminating what our first meeting in Central Park had meant to him. And yet, if anyone else in the world had read it, they would think the scene was purely the start—or in this case, the end—of a grand and fictional love story.
I know it’s more than that. It’s a question: Do you feel the way I do?