Relic

Every Saturday morning I write her a letter in place of a cup of coffee.

The kettle can wait. The stove can click itself awake without me. What matters is the scrape of the chair across the tile and the pen uncapping with that soft, hungry pop, like the day taking its first breath.

I sit at the kitchen table where the light pools thin and gray, and I angle my paper toward the window as if the snow-patched garden can lend me language. The runner on the table is woven and stubborn, always slightly crooked no matter how many times she straightens it. Beyond the glass, the orchard is bare—branches stitched into the sky—everything outside holding still on purpose.

I always begin the same way.

Dear Elynn,

Formalities have their own comfort. A doorframe. A threshold. A way to step into the room without startling anything that might already be there.

I fold the note into quarters—crisp edges, clean—then set it at her place like a small bright animal, blossom-bright against the runner. It waits with its spine straight.

By the time she comes down—forty-five minutes after me, as precise as a train schedule—the house has warmed itself around her absence. The first sound is always the same: the second stair that complains. Then the drag of her sock against wood. Then her breath, settling into the kitchen like she belongs there more than the furniture does.

She sees the letter before she sees me. Her mouth doesn’t smile so much as lift, as if something inside her has taken the weight.

She doesn’t speak. She sits. She unfolds.

Her eyes move left to right with the speed of a woman counting. Her lips make tiny, silent adjustments—grammar corrected with muscle memory, commas nudged into place with the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth. Sometimes she pauses and lets a sentence sit on her tongue like a coin she’s deciding to keep. When she’s satisfied—when she looks up with that full-bellied softness she never admits to having—she reaches for the mug.

Only then does the coffee happen.

We inhabit the ritual like a performance we’ve rehearsed until it became sacred. A missed mark would feel like a curse. A different opening line would tilt the day off its axis, send us wobbling into some other version of ourselves.

Five years on, I still find new angles of her.

Her gift for conspiracy, for instance. If she’s eaten the last pastry in secret or pirated a movie with a straight face, she leans in and lowers her voice like the rafters are wired.

“Let’s not tell anyone about this,” she whispers.

Outside, a sparrow lands in the eaves and turns its head like it understands. Elynn narrows her eyes at it as if it’s already drafting a report.

And her sharpness—her mind as quick as a terrier on scent.

Last month, after an argument that burned itself down and left ash on our tongues, I sat at this same table and wrote letters I didn’t give her. I wrote them with my shoulders tight, with the kind of care that keeps words from becoming knives. I slid them into a drawer behind receipts and a roll of twine, convinced secrecy is the same thing as safety.

The next day I came to bed and found them stacked on my pillow like evidence. Neat. Without a paperclip out of place.

The weight of them waiting where my head would go.

It is November now, and we are living in the country house for the winter. The university has released me into silence on sabbatical. The city feels like a rumor. The road to the house narrows as if the world is trying to forget it exists.

Elynn spreads her sketch paper across the table after breakfast and begins drawing plans for a tiny guest cottage we might build ourselves. She works with a pencil tucked behind her ear, hair pulled up, cheeks reddened by the cold that sneaks through the window seams. Her eraser crumbs gather like snowfall along the margins. When she concentrates, she doesn’t blink for long stretches, and I catch myself holding my breath as if blinking would interrupt her.

On the first truly breathless morning—the sky a hard, impossible blue—I write her a longer note than usual. I let myself linger.

I tell her I like the way the cold makes her hair snarl into thick ropes, the way she fights it with her fingers, impatient and tender at the same time. I describe the quiet outside like a creature curled up at the edge of the yard. I put my hand on the windowpane and feel the cold bite back.

My letters have become more tender lately. The silence out here amplifies everything. Even a small declaration rings.

But by the end of the week, something in her has shifted.

It starts as a delay—half a second too long before she sits down, a glance past the letter instead of at it. Her shoulders stay lifted, not tense exactly, but braced. When she walks across the kitchen, her steps land with care, as if the floorboards have begun to lie to her. She keeps one hand on chair backs and counters like a sailor testing a ship.

Two weekends in a row, she doesn’t even unfold the note in front of me.

She pours coffee first. Her mug clinks too hard against the saucer. Steam rises and disappears like it’s embarrassed.

The letters sit there, corners curling under the kitchen’s dry heat. The paper yellows slightly at the fold. They look older than they should, like abandoned things.

When I finally say her name in the way I reserve for emergencies, she doesn’t turn all the way.

“I’m fine,” she says.

Her voice comes out smooth, practiced. She uses the spoon to stir though she hasn’t added anything.

“Just the old northern heaviness,” she adds, and gives me the faintest shrug. “Family curse.”

She tries to make it sound like weather. Like a front moving through. Temporary.

But I watch her hold the spoon too tightly. I watch the little tremor at her wrist fight to be seen.

That morning I write differently.

I don’t try to be clever. I don’t make the sadness poetic. I write plain, as if plainness might be a rope we can both hold.

I love even this, I write.

I love even the shadow you carry like a second coat. That isn’t to say I want you to feel this way, or prefer it when you do, but that I choose you even when the days are hard for you. Stay with it as long as you need. But leave me a little space inside it.

Then—without thinking—I fold the paper into a bird. A cheap trick. A child’s offering. Wings creased, beak pinched. I set it beside her mug like a promise.

The next morning the bird is still there, untouched, leaning slightly as if exhausted.

The house keeps its own counsel after that.

At night, it settles and shifts the way old buildings do—wood contracting, pipes speaking in knocks, wind combing the eaves. Those sounds used to be background, harmless. Now they feel like commentary. Like the place is paying attention.

I notice small things that shouldn’t matter and begin letting them.

A door left ajar when she never leaves doors ajar. The runner straightened so aggressively the fringe snaps. A blueprint page flipped facedown, graphite smudged as if she’s tried to erase through the paper.

The first time I see my letter-bird again, it’s not where I left it.

It’s on the counter by the sink, unfolded and smoothed flat, pressed down as if by careful hands. The creases remain like scars. And in the margin—faint, gray, as if the pencil was running out of will—one word sits alone:

NO.

My eyes lock on it the way you lock onto a bruise you don’t remember earning. My mind tries to talk itself out of what it sees. A note to herself. A stray mark. A coincidence.

But the loops of the letters catch in my chest.

It is her handwriting.

Not the bright, decisive strokes she uses on blueprints. Something thinner. Trembling. Like a voice trying not to be heard.

The line between us goes taut, quiet and dangerous.

The next day our routine persists, because routines are stubborn that way. The kettle still whistles. The runner still refuses to lie straight. The garden still wears its patchwork snow.

But Elynn closes in on herself.

She doesn’t read at the table anymore. She takes the letter upstairs as if it’s an obligation, not a gift. Sometimes I find it later on the bathroom counter, face down. Sometimes it reappears in the trash, torn into careful strips like she can’t bear to see my sentences intact.

No reply.

Not even her usual sarcasm, the small hooks of humor she uses to keep intimacy from feeling too naked.

It is astonishing, how quickly a silence can become a room you live in.

I start to realize how shallow my knowledge of her truly is. The ritual was supposed to be a bridge. Now it feels like I’ve been building a pier into fog.

In the weeks before Christmas, Elynn spends hours in the dark drawing plans. She doesn’t turn on the overhead light. She works by lamp, the circle of yellow around her hands, the rest of the kitchen a cavern. Her pencil moves and moves. The eraser shaves the page down to nothing. Her fingers smudge graphite along the side of her hand until it looks like she’s been handling ash.

One night I wake and find her sitting at the table.

She is so still at first I think she might be asleep upright, like a child. But her hand is moving, tracing the same lines again and again, as if repeating them will make them true.

I step closer.

The blueprint isn’t the guest cottage anymore.

It’s a house I don’t recognize. She isn’t adding onto it, but drafting something new.

She’s subtracting. Planning demolition while I’m still inside—still trying to find what needs to be mended.

When I reach out and touch her shoulder, she flinches—not from fear, but from intrusion, the way you flinch when someone interrupts you mid-prayer. She shrugs me off gently, as if she doesn’t want to bruise me with her refusal.

And then I see her face.

Tears stand on her lower lashes, controlled, soundless. Her mouth is set like she’s holding something in her teeth.

I want to hold her. I want to shake her. I want to break us both out of whatever this is.

Instead, my hands do what they’ve been trained to do.

I write.

I write a letter so desperate it makes my wrist ache. I write it without metaphors, without ornament, because ornament feels obscene now. I slip it into her palm while she sleeps, warm skin closing around paper without intention.

In the morning her hand is empty.

No letter on the table. No torn strips in the trash.

Just nothing.

Winter keeps going the way winter does: slow, patient, unmerciful. The days lengthen by minutes that feel like insults. The thaw threatens and retreats. Our house becomes a ship trapped in ice, and we live inside our own small, repeated motions because repetition feels like survival.

By spring, the snow has begun dissolving into black puddles along the tracks. The world outside the house remembers motion again. Mud shows itself like a bruise beneath the thaw.

Elynn tells me, over breakfast, that she’ll be leaving for a while.

“To the city,” she says. “To work with my mother. To develop my plans.”

She says it like she’s announcing a meeting. Like this is a reasonable continuation of a project. Her eyes don’t stay on mine long enough for me to argue with her.

I drive her to the small train station. The platform is wet. The air smells like melting and rust. A crow watches us from a signpost, head tilted in judgment.

She stands with her bag at her feet, coat buttoned to the throat, hair braided tight. The train’s lights appear down the track and she doesn’t lean into me—doesn’t do anything that could be mistaken for staying.

When she kisses my forehead, it is the old way.

Formal. Blessed.

As if I’m a relic she no longer has any use for.

The train takes her with a sigh of metal and a shiver of glass. I watch until the last car becomes a smear in the distance and the station returns to its quiet.

Back at the house, the kitchen looks wrong without her body in it. The chair at her place sits too neatly under the table. The runner lies crooked and no one corrects it.

There are no more letters.

Every Saturday morning—and every morning—I wake to the same hour, out of habit and grief. I go to the kitchen. I sit. I listen.

The pipes knock sometimes. The eaves tick. The orchard creaks when the wind tests it.

My hand reaches for the pen anyway, because I don’t know any other way to say her name that might make her come back.