Dear Mara,
I am glad to hear from you. Your correspondence has meant a lot to me too…
Jerome held the letter in his hands, visibly willing his fingers not to shake.
"How long have you been writing each other?" he asked, voice gone rough and somehow deafening in the quiet room.
"Since we met," Mara replied quietly. Her throat felt dry, and she had to make an effort to speak.
"Your father worries about you. After that first meeting, he wasn't sure how things between you were going to go. He just wanted to know you, to keep up with you. He asked me to write to him."
"Where you ever going to tell me?" Jerome asked.
He didn't turn around as he folded the piece of paper in his hands. He looked tense standing there in the middle of her unlit bedroom.
Mara watched the setting sun, shining through her window, as it crept across the boy's back.
"He asked me not to," she replied, running a tired hand over her eyes. "When he asked me to write to him, he made me promise I wouldn't tell you."
"So does he know everything?"
Mara took a deep breath, hands knotting nervously.
"Yes," she said quietly. "Yes, he does."
"I stopped writing him last year, when I...when we…um." Mara paused, stumbling on her words.
The familiar, painful feeling in her stomach that seemed to surface whenever she thought back to what transpired between her and Jerome last year hit the girl with a pang.
When things had taken a turn for the worse, she quickly ended the correspondence. At first, Mara stopped writing because she had been too angry at Jerome, too hurt, and she took it out on John, his father and the person she had strangely come to like through their letters.
John was a lot like his son—intelligent, honest, caring.
At first their letters had been all about Jerome, who had a bad habit of never writing and whose relationship with his father was still fragile and icy. However, gradually, she began writing more and more about herself. Her aspirations, her fears—things she had never shared with her own father. John became a kind friend, a real father figure in place of her own, who had never had a thought to spare for much of anything outside the world of sports, let alone for his daughter.
As the year progressed and the ugly war between her and Jerome continued, she became more and more angry, more ashamed and stopped writing entirely, refusing to answer his increasingly worried letters. She could tell from what he wrote though that his son had ceased whatever limited communication they had shared as well.
But the summer changed things. She caved, forced herself to write John again and told him everything—every last ugly and embarrassing detail. He had asked to see her, and she had gathered the nerve to visit him.
…
"It's all such a mess," she mumbled, furiously wiping at her eyes.
"It will get better, Mara. Take it from me—no one knows more about making mistakes and righting wrongs" John replied, gazing ruefully at her.
"Everyone loses their way, some more so than others," he said gesturing at himself and the room at large. "But your real friends, the people that truly love you, will forgive you in time. Believe me…"
She hadn't been able to keep it in at that and burst into sobs in the middle of the room, earning them odd looks from guards and inmates alike.
...
John had been so kind, too kind, to her. He hadn't once mentioned Jerome, even though she was sure he'd been dying to. She knew the father-son relationship had only worsened, becoming increasingly strained through the summer months.
Mara paused, trying to gather her racing thoughts. She turned her gaze to the window, where the sun continued its decent over the grounds—its last rays pushing further and further into her room.
Jerome cast a brief glance at her. His gaze was piercing, intense. In it, Mara read plainly the anger that marred the surface and the gut-wrenching hurt brewing deeper down. She watched him school his gaze—a bad attempt at bored indifference illuminated by the growing light.
"He wants so badly to hear from you," she said finally.
Jerome's gaze widened, and, for a moment, she could see an eager flicker of hope, whose appearance seemed to send a shot of agonizing pain right to her very center, before he turned his back again.
Mara took a shallow breath, the pain she felt for the boy in front of her still throbbing in her chest.
"You should write to him," she managed to add.
Jerome's back tensed at her words; he curled his hand around the letter, balling it in his fist.
"He misses you," she said simply, her voice a whisper in the large room.
Jerome's body seemed to react almost violently to her words. He cast another glance at her, and this time, all she saw was bitterness.
In an agitated sweep, he tossed the crumpled sheet of paper across the room, turned on his heel and brushed past Mara, stalking out of sight down the hallway.
She stood there a moment, seemingly spent, then quickly walked across the room and retrieved the crumpled letter, smoothing it over as she sank onto her bed. She looked around her bedroom, now completely bathed in dying sunlight.
"…I know it's hard, Mara. But even in the greatest darkness, there is light."