It had been two years since they’d moved, leaving the brown monstrosity behind. She passed her old street and took a quick glance. Sixth house down on the right, but all she could see was the rain. Eight more blocks and she turned onto Grove. She coasted half a block, dismounted, and laid her bike under the massive rhododendron as tradition required. She followed the crack in the sidewalk past two more houses, and she was there.

Number 47 was a middle-period Victorian, set back a full forty yards from the road. It had remained unoccupied for almost a decade, an innocent bystander in some legal battle Megan had never understood. The long narrow path to the front porch split the yard into two enormous rectangles. Ragged dogwoods lined the path, and other ornamental trees were scattered about the yard as if planted by some drunken Johnny Appleseed. Japanese maples clustered in a grove on the left, thirty feet in, while three ancient crab apple trees formed a scalene triangle halfway back on the far right. A privet hedge, long untrimmed, extended out from both sides of the house, then ran down the sides of the yard to form a wall to keep out neighbor friends and foes alike. The house itself was beat up and boarded over and basically unchanged from when she and Michael had first discovered it.

Michael. What was he doing now, anyway? His family had moved to Arizona three years ago, and he had vanished from her life. Did he ever think about the innocent messages they used to exchange here? Had he learned how to spell “rendezvous”?

Megan found herself on the large porch that wrapped around the building like a blanket, running along the front and right side of the house. A battered mailbox was bolted to the railing, a single seven hanging on its side. She stared at the mailbox and longed for X-ray vision. Would she see a pile of pink cloth, limp and pathetic? Or had her offering been transmogrified into something rich and wild?

This is stupid, she thought. She yanked open the box, the hinge squealing, reached inside, and pulled out an envelope.

Her eyes got wet. She felt like that guy in the poem when he first saw the mountains of the New World. She took a breath. This was just too good not to share with someone. Kirsten? They’d barely talked about sex, two horses nudging each other from separate stalls. But in the spaces of their conversation, sex often hid. Yes, Kirsten.

One peek first.

She tore the envelope open. Inside was a single sheet of lined paper. It was blank.