Page 6 of Inez

"That post box is crammed full of letters," I say.

When I let the silence linger, she sighs. "Fine, I'll bite. Letterstowhom andfromwhom?"

"From me to you."

"I don't have a post box in São Paulo," she says.

"No, but I do." I shrug. "They're from me to me, but they're letters I wrote to you. It was…a journal, sort of. It was the only way I could cope with missing you."

The knife resumes snicking open, snicking closed. "Ren," she whispers. "Don't."

"I needed to send them somewhere. The act of mailing out the letters…." I shrug again, shake my head. "It was…it helped me get the feelings out. I wrote you nearly every day for over a decade."

"That many letters wouldn't fit in a single box, Lorenzo," she says. "A letter a day for ten years? That’s…” she pauses to do mental math. “Almost four thousand letters?"

I chuckle. "When it filled up, I went to São Paulo, emptied the letters into a bin, and started over."

"Where is that bin, now?"

"A storage unit a few blocks from the post office, along with some extra gear."

“What did you write about?" she asks, after a few minutes; her tone suggests the question is spoken begrudgingly, as if her curiosity overpowered her reticence to discuss…well, anything to do with our former romantic relationship.

"Everything," I answer. "I complained about work. Superior officers. Missions. I wrote about dead friends. How I missed you. What I'd want to do with you, if I could see you. What I would say if I ever saw you again. Everything. My life."

She doesn't answer for a long, long time. "Why keep them all this time? Especially if you didn’t know if I was even alive.”

"I don't know. Throwing them away seemed wrong. I never imagined I'd actually see you again, though I never stopped hoping." I sigh, shake my head. "I suppose…no. I don't know."

"Say it, Lorenzo." She finally turns to look at me. "Say what you were going to say."

"I kept them because some part of me always held out hope that I would find you one day, and you would…" I pause, clear my throat gruffly, hating the thick knot of clogging emotion. "That you would perhaps want to read some of them, someday."

"Ren," she whispers.

"I know. It's foolish."

She stares at me, her black gaze inscrutable, unknowable. "It isn't foolish."

I don't know how to answer that.

Her gaze rakes back to the window. "Maybe…" a hard swallow. "Maybe someday, I will read them."

I don't know how to answer that, either.

I held onto the thinnest thread of hope for so many years, hoping against all evidence that she was alive, that she was out there somewhere. Hoping she was thinking of me. Missing me. Trying to find me. To return to me. I dreamed of seeing her again.

Our reunion is not as my dreams portrayed.

She does not want me. She is not my Sophia.

I do not know how to reach beyond Inez’s hardened clay golem skin to the Sophia at the core of her. I see glimpses of her, now and then, but I can as easily grasp a fistful of water as I can hold on to those fragments of the woman I once knew.

Long minutes of silence blossom between us, with only the roar of the engine and the hum of the tires.

"I'll never give up on you," I say, my voice low and rough. "I never have and I never will."

"The Sophia you once knew is gone, Lorenzo," she murmurs. "She died in that cell. She died along with the thirty-two people I murdered.”