He said, I think you’d really like her, Ruthie.
And I sat on the floor of my bedroom in my parents’ house with that letter in my lap and I finally understood something I should have understood two years earlier.
I Was in Love With Him
I had been in love with Jeffrey Hale since I was about seventeen and a half, and I had built such an elaborate system for not knowing it that it took another person’s name in his handwriting to break the thing open.
I cried on that floor for probably two hours. Not because of Margaret.
Because I had waited too long to understand my own feelings, and the waiting had cost me something I couldn’t get back.
The Letter I Tore Up
That night I got out paper and started writing to him.
I got four and a half pages in. I told him I loved him. I told him I thought I always had and I was sorry it had taken me so long to say it out loud, and that I didn’t need him to do anything about it, I just needed him to know.
