You know of course cause you’re looking at these photos of this girl, that she looks a lot like you. Creepy isn’t it? I wonder if anyone besides me ever told you that. Not the old one but the kid one. And you know she’s an orphan like you. I know, I know, your old man is alive but to me based on what I know it would have been better if they fried the bastard. One day I hope to talk to you about it. You won’t now, so be it. Me, I’d be yapping my head off about it. It’s something to have lived through. And I respect you for having come out the other end. You’re a survivor Mary Goodwin through and through. I never saw anybody man or woman with your level of determination.

The plan here is that I’m going to write and you know I was going to do a blog and password protect and all that but I just couldn’t deal with worrying about someone hacking into it. Some things paper is better. For one its only in one place. For two you can protect it and tell if anyone got to it with that super duper invention, the licked shut envelope. And three if anything happens to me you’ll have these letters right in your hand to hang onto. I don’t know maybe your too hardass but I know if you went down I’d want to have something that would tell me for real what you’ve been thinking. Cause I honestly don’t know. And I honestly would like to know.

She wondered if Frank even recalled these words by the time he wrote her the last letter. She’d checked the dates on the envelopes, and the last one he’d written on the day of the accident.

Some things hadn’t changed. She hadn’t told him anything more about her father—maybe he realized that would never come. He’d never mentioned this Afghan girl, or her resemblance to her. It seemed as if he were living a parallel life, and she felt absurdly miffed. Who was this Mary he wrote to? Why didn’t he tell her, the living Mary, that she was hard to talk to? Why didn’t he tell her, the person he saw every day, that he resented being assigned a woman as his lead? She knew he did anyway.