Finishing The Letter
Halle wrote back. She told Imogen about the new house. She told her about her dad, and the move, and the school she would start in September. She told her that the floorboard still wobbled but that her dad had said they would leave it that way, in case anybody else ever needed to leave a letter.
A month later, Halle and her dad drove down to Brighton to meet Imogen.
Imogen was very small. She sat in a chair by the window of her room in the home, with a soft blanket on her lap and a pot of tea on the table beside her. Her hands shook a little. Her eyes were the same alert eyes that had watched the war from a London bedroom in 1942.
She held Halle's hands for a long time when they met.
"You found my letter," she said. "After all these years."
"I did."
"And you finished it."
"Did I?"
"You did. The letter was about being afraid. About a cat being missing. About not knowing if anything would come back. You wrote me, all these years later, to tell me the cat HAS come back, and the world IS still here, and somebody small enough to fit a letter under a floorboard is still here too. That's the ending. That's how the letter ends."
Halle thought about this.
"I thought I was the one who needed the answer," she said, very quietly.
"You were one of the people who needed the answer," said Imogen. "I was another. Sometimes a letter waits eighty years to find both halves of itself."