I watched the rest of the film in an excited but confused state. Theresa, the journalist, travels to the Outer Banks in North Carolina where she meets Kevin Costner. Inevitably they fall in love. Theresa finds it impossible to tell him the truth of how she came to find him, fearing his reaction. Of course Costner eventually discovers the deception, opening her bedside drawer and finding the letters he had thrown into the sea after the death of his wife two years earlier. Theresa had balked at the ethical dilemma involved in finding a letter in a bottle, tracking down the sender and then falling in love and sleeping with him. I can sympathize with the first two elements of her equation. I justify it by telling myself that the mother – just as the writer in the film – addressed her letter ‘To all ships at sea, to all ports of call, to my family, to all friends and strangers.’ Sending a letter in a bottle invites a stranger to pick it up and read it. By definition, a letter broadcast to the waves and addressed to the whole world can no longer be private. Somehow I think the unknown mother wanted the tale of her love for her son, the knowledge of his death and her despair, to be known. Where the journalist in the film erred was in deceiving Costner, afraid to tell him about the letters at first, then becoming emotionally involved and afraid of his reaction. I felt I could not lie to my letter-writer, if I ever found her.

Costner runs from Theresa’s apartment into the pouring rain, pursued by her apologizing and explaining. As they shout at one another in the downpour it becomes clear that Costner only wrote two letters, but the journalist has found three; the letter from which the unknown mother lifted a paragraph was written not by Costner, but by Costner’s wife. Her last action was to rise from her deathbed, type out this letter, totter to the cliffs in her billowing white nightdress, and hurl the bottle into the sea, before falling back unconscious into her husband’s arms. You have to be in the right mood to find this anything but embarrassingly corny. Anyhow, Costner still adores his wife and is finding it hard to let himself love Theresa, but his father, played by Paul Newman, tells him that he has to choose between yesterday and tomorrow. He writes yet another letter and slips it into the pocket of his waterproofs, but is drowned while heroically saving a family from a sinking yacht before he can send it. Luckily he stripped off the waterproofs before diving into the sea, so the last letter he wrote is found and returned to his father and Theresa. The film closes with Theresa walking alone on the beach and her voice-over saying: ‘If some lives form a perfect circle, others take shape in ways we cannot predict or always understand. Loss has been a part of my journey but it has also shown me what is precious. So has a love for which I can only be grateful.’ My letter-writer had cannibalized these words too.