I was relieved when I saw it wasn’t Sebastian or Sylvie—it was a number I didn’t have saved, so probably someone calling about work. But it felt too soon to commit to a new client, even if Claudia didn’t have much longer.
I stepped off the sidewalk to let a cluster of neon-clad joggers pass.
“Hello, Clover speaking.”
All I heard in response was a bark.
“Hello?” I repeated, a little impatiently.
“Oh, hi, Clover.” The familiar voice made my heart thump. Another excited bark. “Gus! Chill, buddy.” The sound of the phone fumbling. “Sorry, Clover—hang on a sec.”
“Um, sure.” My mind spun through all the possible reasons Hugo might be calling; perhaps I’d left my scarf at the Curious Whaler.
“Okay, I’m back,” Hugo said. “Sorry about that—Gus was trying to chase a squirrel. Oh, and it’s Hugo, by the way.”
“Hi, Hugo.” I waited for my usual phone-call anxiety to kick in, but it didn’t.
“I hope it’s okay that I’m calling you.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I got your number from my friends who own the motel you stayed at. To be honest, I’ve been debating whether it was a creepy thing to do, but then I decided that you’d probably want to know.”
“Know what?” An inexplicable energy buzzed under my skin.
“Well, a few days after you guys were here, I decided to finally go through a crate of my grandfather’s things that he’d left on the boat. I’d been avoiding it for months.” I could definitely relate to that. “And there was an old shoebox in there.”
“Okay…”
“It was filled with letters from Claudia, plus a couple that he wrote to her but never sent. There’s a photo of her in there too.”
That ice-skating really made my legs feel like jelly. “Did you read any of them?”
“Just one.” Hugo’s nervous laugh was endearing. “But it was so intimate. Not in a sexual kind of way, thank God, but just the longing of it all. It makes me so sad that they never found their way back to each other.”
The low, gentle tone of his voice felt calming. “Me too.”
“I was thinking that it might help Claudia to see them, and to know he kept them … if it’s not too late. It would make me feel like I did one last thing for him.” Another bark from Gus. “How is she doing?”
I thought back to my last conversation with Sebastian. Maybe the letters would be enough to convince him to let me tell Claudia.
“I don’t think she has much longer—a week at best. Probably not enough time for you to send them down here.” I wondered how much a one-day courier from Maine would cost. Even if it was several hundred dollars, I’d be willing to pay if it meant giving Claudia a small sense of resolution.
“Actually,” Hugo said, “Gus and I are in New York right now—I had to come down for a work thing.” In the background, a fire engine wailed in confirmation. “We’re headed back home tonight, but maybe I could meet you somewhere and give you the letters this afternoon?”
“Um, sure, that would be great.” Pulse thumping, I frantically tried to think of an appropriate meeting place. After Sylvie’s critical reaction to my apartment, there was no way I’d invite anyone else in there. “There’s a nice café in my neighborhood that’s dog friendly. I can text you the address.”
Was it reckless to agree so quickly to meet up with a virtual stranger? Or since we’d already eaten dinner together, perhaps that bumped us up to acquaintances. I’d only met him once, but it felt like I’d known Hugo for longer.
“Great,” he said brightly. “Can’t wait to see you, Clover.”
My legs didn’t hurt so much anymore.
* * *
Hugo was wearing the wool sweater I’d seen hanging on the houseboat railing. The cable knit clung to his broad shoulders as he leaned against the brick wall outside the café. When he grinned in my direction, I almost turned to check if it was intended for someone behind me. The warmth of it felt like more than I’d earned.
Gus, who’d been making the most of the olfactory wonderland that is a New York City sidewalk, trotted over and rested his front paws on my thighs. I cupped his face between my hands.
“Hey, Clover!” Hugo looped Gus’s leash around his wrist to rein him in. “I’m so happy we could make this work.”
“I’m glad you called me.” I was also glad that I hadn’t had time to dye my hair blue.
“Of course.” That grin again. He gestured at the old shoebox under his arm. “Should we go inside and read these over coffee?”
“Definitely.” I walked quickly through the door he was holding open and wondered if a heart could beat eighty times per second.
The café was even more packed than the last time I was there, with Sylvie. It felt like years, not months, since that first coffee we’d had together. I missed her company and frank advice.
Anxiety knotted in my stomach as I scanned the room for an empty table. I didn’t have a backup plan, but, mostly, I didn’t want to disappoint Hugo. The knots loosened as I spied the only unoccupied table: my favorite single-seater in the corner.
“Here, you sit down and I’ll find us another chair,” Hugo said.
I watched him approach two women across the room, observing how they played with their hair and giggled like he’d made a really funny joke and not just asked to borrow their extra chair. I felt their eyes scrutinizing me, questioning my presence as he sat down across from me. Even the server delivered our coffees like I was an afterthought, her attention trained solely on Hugo as she slid the drinks between us. I was grateful for Gus pressing his head against my leg under the table.
But Hugo seemed to tune everyone out but me.
The times I’d been with Sebastian, he’d always seemed distracted, looking around at other tables, or his phone, like he was checking to see if something more interesting was happening. I liked the way Hugo listened closely to what I said, catching mundane details and asking about them like he actually wanted to know the answer.
I almost forgot that we were there to read the letters.
We worked our way through the yellowed envelopes, piecing together the timeline. After Claudia had come home from France in the summer of 1956, she’d continued to write Hugo’s grandfather letters, mostly about how conflicted she was about getting married and giving up her photography career.
“It seems like he must have tried to convince her to come back to France and marry him instead,” Hugo said, scanning the letter in his hand. “Are there any more letters from her?”
His knee brushed against my thigh under the small table as he leaned over to look into the shoebox. I concentrated on sifting through the remaining envelopes instead of the feeling of my legs dissolving.
One letter was thinner than the rest.
“Only one.” I pulled out the dainty note card and read Claudia’s perfectly slanted cursive.
Hugo—
We are not meant to be in this lifetime … perhaps we will meet in another.
I’ll keep you in my heart until then.
—Claudia
We sat wordlessly, processing the finality of Claudia’s words. The noise of the crowded café felt distant, inconsequential.
“That’s it? No other explanation?” Hugo frowned at the note card. “That’s pretty harsh. Knowing how sensitive my grandpa was, that must’ve really broken his heart.”
I imagined the yearning between the two young lovers, letting it spill through my body like it was my own. Even though I knew it ended in pain, I still envied their intimacy.
The remaining letters were addressed to Claudia and still sealed. “None of these have stamps or postage marks,” I said, picking up the first one. It almost felt illicit to tear it open.
Hugo’s grandfather wrote mostly in English with smatterings of stream-of-consciousness French.
“You inhabit my waking moments and my dreams,” I read aloud from the letter. “Wow. Except for his slightly indecipherable handwriting, his written English was really good. And for a guy in the 1950s, he was unusually in touch with his emotions.”
Sadness tempered Hugo’s smile. “Yeah, he was always that way—told me he loved me every time he saw me.”
“That’s really special.” I sipped my coffee, hoping it would soothe the pang of envy.