Work Text:
There’s a letter that sits in her nightstand drawer that she doesn’t have to open in order to recite every line word for word.
She’s read it so many times that she can see it in her mind, Elliot’s handwriting drooping and low, his letters blending together the more that he puts pen to paper.
There are small dots on the pages where she can only assume his tears fell, because she knows that he cried when he wrote it.
Not only has he told her that, but she can’t imagine how he wouldn’t.
The things that he said in there, the words that he put down, they were enough to make even the strongest of men break.
Which is why when he had first given it to her, exactly one year ago today, she had had such a hard time believing that he had actually written it.
He was never the wordy one between them, it was always her.
And she was always better at the emotions and the personal stuff than him.
She was shocked to see that that had appeared to have changed.
Back then she assumed that nothing about him had changed, because even when he handed her that letter in the snow filled park, she had still been so bitter and angry and confused.
His arrival in New York had sent a cascade of emotions through her and it had been like a tidal wave.
A tidal wave that she was drowning in, everything about him pulling her under once again.
But she had given him his time and his space and had done her best to just simply, be, and that had apparently been enough.
Because now the nightstand that she kept that letter in was housed in a bedroom that she shared with him.
And she didn’t need to open it and read over the heartfelt lines and cry herself to sleep at night.
And if she wanted him to say that he loved her and that he needed her and that he was sorry that he had left her, all she had to do was roll over and ask him.
He had told her once, probably when they had moved, why the hell she was keeping the damn thing anyway.
She had simply told him that it meant something to her, to them, and that it was worth keeping.
Afterall, it was because of that single four page handwritten letter that she had told him that she loved him back all those months ago.