I had come to hate that word with a specific passion over the course of this story, because later was where everyone kept filing the two of them, and later was a place that never actually arrived.

Years of a boy’s letters and a girl’s replies had been sacrificed to later, to the comfortable adult fiction that there would always be more time to fix it, right up until there was a shoebox full of unsent love and two children who each believed the other had stopped caring.”

“Was Silas writing to her?

All this time?”

“He sent letters, yes.”

“Did she ever write back?”