Ok guys im back, i am a little better now and it was not covid so yay!

Guys Anne describes some of the assault in her letter so just like be aware if that could bother you I don't want you to read it if it might

For the first time in her life, Anne had written a letter without the word Dear to begin it.

She had nearly begun her letter Dear Billy, simply out of habit, but stopped herself just in time. Her letter was not one of wrath or vengeance, but there was certainly no place in it for pleasantries.

Billy,

No doubt you're surprised to find this in your letter box. I'm rather surprised myself. I have no desire to make contact with you, but I felt I must. Soon you will see why.

I am marrying, and in starting a new chapter of my life I felt a need to close the previous one. So much of my life has been taken up by upset, you know, and I do not want that to follow me into my new life as a married woman.

Whether you will be so good as to read this I do not know. I may be wasting my time. If you do decide to read it, please do not take it as an invitation for further contact. You have no reason to need to speak to me and I would prefer you didn't.

Your mother mentioned you will be marrying before long. If you have not told your fiancé about your past, you ought to now- before the marriage license is signed. I expect you do not have any inclination to tell her; it doesn't benefit you in any way to do so. But it is something she must know. She needs to know the whole story, from start to finish, told plainly and without you trying to paint any of it in a better light. If you truly believe that what you feel for her is love, you must give her the benefit of having the truth, and the freedom to decide whether or not she can live with it.

Moving on, I want you to know how your actions have altered the course of my life and of those around me.

When I was younger, and all of this was new, I did not want you to know how much you had impacted me. I wanted you to believe that I didn't spend even one moment thinking of you. I wanted you to believe that I was not- could not- be afraid of you, and that you were wholly insignificant to me. Why? Because I did not want you to feel even the slightest bit of power. If you felt power, then you had won. And so I pretended you didn't matter in the slightest.

But now, after time has passed by, I feel differently in that regard. Instead, I worry that by pretending you mattered little, I let you off far too easily. You may still to this day believe that you did not affect my life in any permanent fashion, because I tried so hard to make that true. The truth is, Billy, the truth is that you deserve to be explicitly aware of all that you have done and all that you are responsible for. You caused significant damage and it is only right that you should feel the weight of that damage.

And so I am going to tell you the ways in which you hurt me.

A weak man would give up reading right now, throw away this letter, and continue his life with the belief that he is not at fault, because that is the far easier path. A better man would not. A better man would take a breath and keep reading; opening himself to soul searching, and choosing to own his role in the events that follow.

When I walked to school that morning I truly had no knowledge of what intimate relations entailed. I thought I did, and I had some sort of fairy story in my head. That morning would end the fairy story. You caused me to learn in painful and graphic detail the ways in which a man could oppress and violate a woman. And I wasn't even a woman. I was just a little girl.

I know you believe you had justification in what you did. Whether you still believe that I don't know. I hope you don't. I hope that with time and maturity you understand that such an act of brutality has no justification, and that no one has the right to infringe on another's body. I hope now, especially, as you plan to marry- whoever this young woman is- that you respect her right to bodily autonomy and that you strive to make her feel safe. She deserves that.

My experience of being attacked in the woods by you is indescribable. Yet I want to describe it, because I want you to be aware, as much as possible, of the way it felt to endure it.

Imagine that you are walking to a new place, in which you don't fit in, and a person- still a stranger to you, really- a person much larger than you- startles you. You can easily sense that this person is seething with anger at you but for a moment you don't know why. When you find out, you attempt to smooth things over but quickly realize that they have no intention of accepting any apology you might give. You are alone, and you are trapped.

In a moment you are shoved to the hard ground and you feel the dirt underneath you. It isn't possible to get away, and you brace yourself to be hit. But a hit never comes. Instead, your clothing is torn away from your most intimate area and you experience a far worse kind of humiliation than you ever thought possible.

What is happening to your body is painful. It is more painful than anything you have ever experienced, and in fact you have experienced a lot in your life. The pain is made worse by the fact that it is happening in your most sensitive area, and by a person who has every intention of hurting you as much as they possibly can. Your breath becomes shallow, your mind is simultaneously frozen and racing, and all you can think of is the pain and the will to survive.

I cannot imagine what the attack was like for *you*, Billy, how it felt to have someone pushing against you, crying, unable to breathe and begging to be let go. Knowing that you *chose* to ignore the tears and continue the brutalization is beyond my comprehension.

What happened after you attacked me was worse.

I don't like to admit that I lived in fear. Again, I didn't want you to "win". But the truth is that I absolutely did live in fear. I was afraid to be alone. I did not walk to school alone after that, and I tried hard to avoid being alone in outdoors at all. And that was the worst part to me, because for much of my life the great outdoors was my only kindred spirit, and you took that from me. I had to hide from what was once my only friend.

That wasn't the only hiding I did. I learned how to hide my pain, my sadness, my anxiety and my fears. I hid from the people who loved me most and wanted to help me. I hid the clothes you ripped. I hid the bruises you left on me. I hid the fact that I was pregnant for as long as I could. I want you to think for a moment about what that was like- about how lonely that was.

I harbored many secrets during those days. One, a secret fear that this was simply what intimacy entailed- and how could I ever marry, if that were the case? Was *this* truly intimate relations? Was this what every wife endured, and never spoke of? Marriage, by that route, would be terrifying. I am fortunate to know now that intimate relations need *not* be the brutality that you showed me. It is instead supposed to be an act of gentleness, that bonds a couple in love and mutual care of each other. ...But knowing in your mind and understanding in your heart are two different things, and even years later I fear intimacy. You did that. You turned something beautiful into something to be feared, and no matter what I know logically, it will take time and much concentrated effort to push past where you left me and begin to experience intimacy the way God intended it.

I used to wonder why I had to carry a baby due to what you did. I thought God was being terribly unfair. Nowadays I don't believe God caused me to have a baby. You caused that yourself. I won't blame Him for your doing. Although He certainly could have prevented the whole thing by somehow stopping you and saving me from that, and I suppose I'll always wonder why He didn't. ...But you know, someday my little boy is going to do wonderful things in the world and then I'll know exactly why he had to be here and I'll be glad he is. When those wonderful things happen, it'll be a credit to those who raised him.

You will never know, Billy, what it is like to be pregnant or to give birth. Let me educate you. It is having a decently-sized pumpkin that must rip through your body and pull itself through an opening much smaller than, let's say, an apple. Just imagine that for a moment- trying to fit a pumpkin through an opening like that. If you imagined a lot of frustration, mess, and wasted effort, you haven't imagined well enough. The doctor had to give me stitches, did you know that? And then, six weeks later, I had to return to the doctor and be intruded upon all over again as it was time to remove the stitches.

Recovering from a baby is excruciating, too. A woman can't truly rest and feel better because an infant always needs her awake for something or other. It is tiring for any woman, of course, and I was a fourteen year old. ...But you, Billy, you never once had to disrupt your sleep in all that time- only I did. The baby was my responsibility, though I never asked for him, while you- the one person who actually had a choice in the matter- was able to sleep through it all and be undisturbed.

I feel sorry for him much of the time, you know. It isn't right for him to have been born without a father- no, that isn't accurate- I should say, born with a father who has no interest in him. No child deserves that.

And for the longest time he suffered from a mother who had no interest in him, either...you see, his physical appearance, and some of his temperament, made me afraid to welcome him, let alone get close to him, and I avoided even looking him in the eye for fear I would see his father there. Had he come to me some other way (some way that didn't involve you) he would have been adored from the first- which is what he deserves.

I feel angry with you, Billy, for causing such a rift between me and my child. It is your fault that I have trouble accepting him. Your behavior and your choices are what made it hard for me to love this innocent child for so long.

There are a lot of other things I intended to do with my life besides have a child. I wanted to get an education, go to college, and become a teacher. I had hoped my meager earnings would be of help to the Cuthberts. Instead, I rely on the Cuthberts more than ever. You stole my earning potential and my way to give back to them.

Pay is not the only reason I wanted to have a career. I envisioned giving service to a community, providing the education young souls need to set themselves on a straightforward path to success and happiness in their lives. I wanted young girls, especially, to see me come into their town educated and liberated, and know that they too could aim for great heights- perhaps I could lead girls to become writers, scientists, doctors! Girls will be able to do ever so much more in the years to come, and I wanted to be a teacher so that I could prepare them for those bright futures! Again you stole from me. Not just from me, really, but from any girl I may have helped while I was a teacher. ...I suppose on that matter you will be glad I did not succeed, as ladies empowerment is of no concern to you. But even you must see that the world is changing.

My world is changing, too, and it is because of this change that I saw fit to close the previous chapter of my life and head confidently into a new one. By letting you know exactly what you have done, I feel I have taken the burden off my shoulders and laid it where it belongs. What you'll do with it, I don't know. Perhaps you will accept it, and wear it for a time, and see how it feels to carry it. Perhaps you will even use it to mold yourself into a better man.

Goodbye.

Anne did not sign her name to the letter; she didn't see a point. He would know by the return address who had sent it, and by signing her name she felt she would have made some sort of nod of friendliness between them.