Three Letters Without a Return Address
The day was still, not a breath of wind, no rustle of leaves, no birdsong—as though nature itself had frozen in eternal silence. The mourners stood quietly around the open casket and the gaping grave beside it. Emily held her father’s arm. He stood hunched, bewildered, his eyes fixed on her mother in the coffin.
Nearby stood her parents’ old friends, Margaret and her husband, Vincent. Emily had known them since childhood, always calling them by their first names. Margaret dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, while Vincent stared blankly into the distance. Across from them stood three of her mother’s colleagues, their noses red, eyes swollen from weeping. Others lingered too—strangers Emily had never seen before. But if they had come, they must have known her mother.
No one approached now to say their final goodbyes or offer condolences. That had all been done at the funeral home. They were simply waiting for the ceremony to end.
Emily spotted the gravediggers nearby. The lead one, sensing her gaze, raised his eyebrows as if to ask, *Ready?* She gave a slight nod. It was time. They lifted the lid propped against a tree and carried it to the coffin.
“Everyone said their farewells? We’ll close it now,” the gravedigger said.
Then, a quiet but commanding voice cut through the air.
“Wait.”
Every head turned toward the speaker—a tall, broad-shouldered man in a long black coat and a wide-brimmed hat. He stepped forward as the workers hesitated, holding the lid. The stranger laid two white roses in the coffin and rested his palm over her mother’s folded hands, as if trying to warm them. He stood like that for minutes while the others watched, wondering who he was. One of the gravediggers coughed pointedly. The man withdrew his hand and stepped back. The lid was secured, the coffin lowered, and Emily was the first to toss a handful of earth onto it.
As the grave was filled, she searched for the stranger, but he had vanished. Once the cross and wreaths were in place, the mourners drifted toward the cemetery gates. Emily and her father lingered a little longer.
“Dad, let’s go,” she said softly, and he let her lead him away.
On the walk home, she wondered who the man could have been. He had appeared like a shadow and left just as quietly. His face had been hidden beneath the hat, but she’d caught a glimpse of a clean-shaven chin and what might have been glasses—though she couldn’t be sure.
The wake was held at a café near their house. Emily couldn’t eat. She was exhausted, willing the day to end. When the last guests departed, she and her father left too, Emily clutching her mother’s framed portrait—an exact copy of the one left on the grave.
“Are you all right?” she asked him.
He only nodded.
“Dad… who was that man at the grave?”
“How should I know?”
There was an edge in his voice. They walked the rest of the way in silence. The flat still smelled of medicine and sickness, despite the open windows. Her father lay down on the sofa, eyes closed. Emily draped a blanket over him and sat beside him, glancing at the bedroom door where her mother had spent her final days.
*”She’s free now,”* she repeated to herself, echoing the condolences. Free—her mother from the cruel illness, Emily from the endless dread, her father from his helplessness. Tears welled up. She slipped into the kitchen, buried her face in her hands, and wept.
As the days passed, the pain dulled. Emily cleared away reminders of her mother’s sickness. She attended university but felt hollow, adrift. Her father shuffled around the house like an old man, silent. The sound of his slippers dragging grated on her. Couldn’t he see she was grieving too? She had lost her mother. Now the house, her father—everything fell to her.
“Dad, what should we do with Mum’s clothes?” she asked one day, just to make him speak.
“I don’t know. Give them away.”
Easier said than done. To whom? Over the weekend, she sorted through her mother’s things. The newer items she kept, unsure who might need them. The worn-out pieces she bundled up and took to the bins. It felt wrong, but there was no helping it.
Their shoe sizes didn’t match either. She left the old boots by the bins—maybe someone would take them. In one box, she found a pair of pristine white heels. She couldn’t bring herself to throw them out. Trying them on, they were too big. As she packed them away, she noticed three yellowed envelopes at the bottom, postmarked nearly two decades apart. Two were addressed to her mother, a month between them. The third came years later. None had a return address.
Why had her mother hidden them here? Why keep them at all? Reading someone else’s letters felt wrong—but her mother was gone. Maybe the writer was too. Emily kept glancing at the envelopes as she worked.
She wouldn’t rest until she knew. If there had been a real secret, her mother wouldn’t have kept them. Maybe she’d *wanted* them found. They hadn’t been well-hidden. Could she have forgotten? If the shoes had been old, Emily would have tossed the box unopened.
She took the first letter.
*…You are my happiness. I’ve only just left, and already I’m lost without you… Thank you for being in my life. I think of you always, I love you…*
A lover’s letter, a man parted from his beloved.
The second:
*…I feared this, but I knew it would come. Thank you for telling me. What will you do?… You know I’m married—I never hid that. I have two children… I won’t abandon them. You’re young, beautiful, your whole life ahead. You’ll marry, you won’t be alone… But the choice is yours. If you keep the child, let me know. I’ll send money. Don’t refuse—it’s the least I can do. Forgive me…*
More words of love, regret, how late they’d met.
The third:
*…I’m to blame, I won’t deny it. But what’s done is done… You named her Emily? I’m leaving. I don’t know when—or if—I’ll return… Live! You’re free! Don’t wait for me, don’t look back. Keep our secret. Burn these letters. Thank you for being in my life…*
No signatures, no names—just a checkmark like a bird in flight beneath the last one. So her father wasn’t her father. There was another. Her mother had loved someone before, had borne his child. A clandestine affair straight out of a novel. Someone important, perhaps, if he wouldn’t sign his name. And yet—why hadn’t her mother burned them? Couldn’t bring herself to? Forgotten?
*What do I do with this?* Without these letters, she’d never have known. But it changed nothing. Her father *was* her father—the one who’d sat by her sickbed, taken her sledging, scolded her for sneaking cigarettes. The other man was a stranger who’d abandoned them both.
She tucked the letters beneath her lingerie. Her father would never look there.
Her parents had rarely argued. She’d never doubted he was her father. He’d loved her mother, loved her. Grieved her deeply. Her mother had been beautiful before the illness. Emily didn’t resemble her—nor her father, now that she thought of it.
She decided to say nothing. He had no one else. If she revealed the truth, she’d take even herself from him.
She remembered the man at the graveside. *Could it have been him?* Had he loved her mother after all? But why hide his face? A celebrity, perhaps?
Emily was in her fourth year at university when a prestigious magazine hosted a gala for its twenty-fifth anniversary. The journalism department received a handful of invitations.
One went to Daniel, a promising student already published in newspapers. He and Emily had just started seeing each other.
“Fancy going?” he asked, waving the ticket.
“Try and stop me,” she laughed.
The ballroom was crowded with luminaries. Emily’s eyes shone with excitement. Waiters wove through the guests with champagne flutes. Speeches and toasts filled the air.
A banner bore the magazine’s logo—an open journal with a torn sheet fluttering like a bird above it. Something nagged at her.
“What does the logo mean?” she asked a passing guest.
“It’s a gull—the magazine’s symbol. Didn’t you know? The founder was Jonathan Gull. You’ve heard of him? Ah, there he is.”
Emily turned—and gasped, startling Daniel. The checkmark in the letters—the *gull*. The founder’s name was *Gull*. It couldn’t be coincidence.
She rushed toward him before he could vanish like at the cemetery. Only as she neared didShe handed the letters to him without a word, then turned and walked away, leaving the past where it belonged—buried, like her mother, beneath the quiet earth.
