March 14, 2013 – Scenario: While refinishing an old desk you purchased at an estate sale, you discover a letter wedged between two drawers. What does the letter say? Who wrote it? For whom was it intended?

. . .

When she answers, she sounds breathless, and immediately I try not to imagine the myriad reasons she could be. "It this a bad time?"

"Not at all," she says, even though it sounds like she's on a treadmill. "I'm just walking to my car."

"Walking?"

"What?"

"You sound breathless."

"Oh. I'm walking in heels. In the dark. No matter how comfortable I get here, I can never entirely banish Charlie's self-defense tips from my mind when I'm walking alone at night."

"Oh." I realize, suddenly, that I've never seen Bella in heels. Not real ones, anyway; nothing close, with the exception of the tiny ones she wore to homecoming a million years ago. The realization is one more thing reminding me that for all I miss Bella the girl, there's a whole host of things I don't know about Bella the woman. Close on the heels of that realization comes another: it's Friday night, and how many reasons are there for beautiful, single women to wear heels on a Friday night? Still, she's walking to her car alone, so I press on.

"Hot date?"

She chuckles, and I feel my shoulders relax. "Oh, yeah. With a fifty-something woman. She loves good books and red wine, so I think I may have found my soul mate." Off my silence, she laughs again, and I think maybe I could spend forever listening to her laugh from hundreds of miles away. "My editor. We were meeting to talk about my next project."

"Oh." Her first project still haunts me in its ambiguity. "What's it about?"

"I'm not really sure yet. I've kind of been working on a few different things."

"Any you'd care to share?"

A beat of silence, then: "Letters."

"Letters?"

"I found this old letter in a desk I bought at an estate sale awhile back. There was no envelope, and it was in pretty pristine shape, so I have no idea if it was ever even sent."

I prop my feet up on my coffee table and lean back into the cushions of my sofa, beer bottle resting on one thigh, cold seeping through my jeans. "That's wild. What did it say?"

"It was sort of…an un-love letter."

"An un-love letter?"

"From someone who'd had his heart broken and was writing to the woman who broke it. It got me thinking about the lost art of the letter, and how so much of the language of love and loss is getting lost in more modern, digital communication. But that's really as far as I've gotten with it; I don't really know what a book like that would look like, or how I'd even go about writing it."

"I'd read it," I say, leaving out the rest of the truncated truth: I'd read anything she wrote. Even if it was an un-love letter itemizing all of the ways I'd let her down.

"Well, if there are a couple thousand other people who feel the same way, maybe it'll be something someday." I hear the muted thunk of a car door closing, and she exhales. "So. How was your day?"

I smile at my coffee table at the utter simplicity, the lovely amiability of her question and the moment. "It was good, thanks. Though this is the highlight."

"Yikes. That's pretty sad."

I don't correct her; instead, I plow forward. "Hey, I'm going to be in Sacramento next month. Can I buy you dinner?"

Again, silence. "Um. Well, Sacramento's an hour and a half away."

"I don't mind driving." Another truncated truth. I'd drive from Seattle to Tallahassee if it bought me minutes in her company.

"Okay. I guess so." Wary. Hesitant. Unsure.

"Hey, Bella?"

"Yeah."

"You can say no." It's the same reassurance I gave her years ago; I wonder if the parallels ricochet around in her mind the way they do in my own. "It's okay if you're not ready for that, or you don't feel comfortable. I'll understand."

A brief pause, and if she were the Bella I once knew, she'd be biting her bottom lip, eyes gazing out unseeingly as she weighed the pros and cons. But I know very little of this Bella, and so I wait. "No," she says finally, and my heart plummets. "No, I think…that would be nice." And it soars. "But this is my city. I'm buying."

"Not a chance."

"You won't even know where to go."

"So you'll tell me."

"I'll pick the cheapest dive restaurant ever unless you let me buy."

Open my mouth to protest again, and sudden clarity strikes: this isn't a date. Perhaps this – her insistence at paying – is her attempt to make clear that it's not a date. "Okay. On one condition."

"Hm. What is it?" Wary, again. Wary, always, where I'm concerned.

"Write me a letter."

"Excuse me?"

"An un-love letter. Or an un-friend letter. Or just a letter. Write me one." Because that's me: always asking things of her.

"Okay," she says finally, softly.

"Yeah?"

"If you really want one." There's a warning note in her voice, but a letter – even if it details all of the reasons she has spent years hating me – is more of her words, more of her, and that's something I'd never say no to.

"I really do."

. . .

There are girls everywhere, but not the one I want. Never the one I want. The one I want is the only one I can't see, the only one who hides herself away from me, keeps her distance. I say no to a lot of invitations, a lot of offers, and every time I say no, my conscience ridicules me: such a simple word, and where was it when I really needed it? When it would have saved me – saved us – so much heartache?

Rosalie, thankfully, isn't among them, but the rest are there. At my car. At my lunch table. At my locker, my desk, waiting outside the locker room after baseball practice. One even manages to get into the locker room while I'm in the shower, and I don't think I'll ever live down the team's disbelief that I turned down her rather overt advances. But the appeal of what I thought I wanted so badly, what I was so curious about, what I couldn't stop myself from picturing, daydreaming about, wanting desperately, has soured in the harsh light of what it cost me.

On the rare occasions that I do see Bella – in Trig, in the hallways, in the cafeteria - I watch her, not even trying to hide it, hoping against hope that she'll see the anguish, the desperate shame, the pleading hope in my eyes. But she never looks at me, and every time her brown eyes avoid mine, she feels even farther away. She looks even smaller now, though I wouldn't have thought it possible; her shoulders hunch as if she's curling in on herself, trying to shield her soft underbelly, and idly I wonder what she's protecting herself against. When the truth comes to me, I feel as if I've broken us all over again.

I call, but she never answers. When I get Charlie, the disappointment in his voice is its own censure; we were the two men charged with taking care of the same girl, and I'm the half of the equation that failed miserably. When my mother tentatively asks me where Bella is one afternoon a week after Rosalie's party, I break down. It's the first time I've cried in my mother's arms since I was a child.

. . .