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The house is too quiet, and Effie doesn't know what she expected, maybe something haunted, maybe. Something broken. But the little lake cottage is… intact, too intact. The walls are whitewashed, the floors swept, and the bed doesn’t even creak when she sits down with her suitcase still zipped and untouched beside her.
The rebellion called it a safe house, though no one mentioned what she was supposed to feel safe from. Her thoughts? The ghosts? The Capitol?
Herself?
She peeks out the window, where the trees stir without urgency, like they’ve always been this calm. The lake glimmers with that strange blue of post-winter water. Still. Bottomless.
And there, out front by the crumbling stone path, is a mailbox.
It stands at attention like it’s waiting for her old, metal, painted red once, but worn down now to soft silver like a secret.
Effie Trinket doesn’t do nature. She doesn’t do exile, either, but she does know how to follow instructions, so she sighs, walks outside, and places her shoes carefully on the porch boards, one of them creaks like it’s scolding her and opens the mailbox.
There’s a letter inside and she freezes.
No postage and no name on the front. Just a folded envelope tucked inside like someone had left it moments ago.
She glances over her shoulder and there’s no one. No footprints in the dirt but hers.
She opens it.
Effie,
If you’re reading this, then I guess we’re sharing the house. Just not at the same time. It’s gonna sound insane, but trust me the mailbox works. It’s how I found out someone named “Effie” would end up here eventually. You. It’s 74 AEV for me. I’m guessing it’s later for you. Please don’t move the armchair in the corner. My back’s just gotten used to it.
— Haymitch Abernathy
She stares at the signature.
Haymitch.
He’s… she hasn’t seen him in years. Not since the war ended. Not since everything crumbled. She had imagined he was dead more times than she cared to admit. But this… this is dated two years ago.
Effie narrows her eyes. She checks the envelope again. No Capitol insignia. No seal. No sign it came from anywhere but… right here.
And she knows that armchair it’s ugly as sin. Yellow with a burn mark in the cushion. She almost tripped over it when she came in.
This is a joke, a very weird one. A prank, maybe but no one knows she’s here. She was dropped off by hover, no phones, no contact.
She glances at the letter again.
The ink smells faintly like whiskey.
That night, she can’t sleep. The house creaks with unfamiliar confidence, and her nerves are a tangled mess of war memories and lake water. At some point and maybe just to prove to herself that it’s nonsense, she writes back.
Haymitch,
If this is your idea of a joke, I don’t find it particularly funny. Though I suppose I should be flattered that you think I’m “Effie” enough to fall for a mailbox trick. In any case, the armchair stays. It’s hideous, but oddly comfortable.
It’s 76 AEV. I don’t know what I’m doing here, and I doubt you do either. If this letter actually reaches you (which it won’t), congratulations, you’re insane.
Yours in confusion,
Effie
She puts it in the mailbox. Just because. Not because she believes it, of course not.
She closes the lid. And the next morning, it’s gone.
January 7, 74 AEV
Effie (if that’s really you),
So either I’m drunker than I thought and it is entirely possible, or that tin-can mailbox is doing something real weird. Because your letter was there this morning. Fresh ink. Smelled like that perfume you used to wear when you thought I wasn’t paying attention.
(I was. For the record.)
What kind of sick timeline has you crashing into my lake house? Don’t answer that. You always did show up in the wrong place looking too shiny to belong.
Anyway. I guess I believe it now. You’re two years ahead. And still kicking. That’s... good. Weird. Good.
Stay as long as you want. Don’t touch my liquor stash.
H.
Effie rereads the letter six times.
Then she gets angry. Then confused and finally a little bit… sad.
Then she opens a bottle of red wine and writes back, tipsy and defiant.
January 9, 76 AEV
Dear Mr. Abernathy,
Your "liquor stash" is gone, by the way. Either you drank it all or time travel erased your bourbon. Tragic.
Yes, it's me. Yes, I’m alive. And yes — I did wear that perfume on purpose. Don't flatter yourself. You were the only person in the Capitol who didn’t tell me what to be, so of course I noticed you noticing.
Tell me something only you would know, just to be sure. Like…
Remember that year, the 63rd, I think, when we got locked in the prep suite after hours and you tried to seduce me with vending machine champagne?
You were terrible at it, but you did kiss me and we did other things. I never told anyone.
— Effie
He doesn’t write back for three days.
Effie pretends not to care but she watches the lake, and reorganizes the pantry. She cries once, quietly, and only after she burns the rice.
On the fourth day, the flag on the mailbox is up.
January 13, 74 AEV
Eff,
Shit. You remember that?
I told myself you’d forgotten. Or maybe pretended to we were so good at it.
Yeah, it was the 63rd. I’d just mentored two tributes straight into the grave and you wore that ridiculous gold dress with feathers like you were trying to levitate out of the Capitol on glamour alone.
I kissed you because I wanted to know what it felt like to be alive again. You let me because you were lonely, or maybe curious. We never talked about it.
You looked like you'd bite my hand off if I tried a second time.
I thought about it, though.
I still do.
— Haymitch
She presses the paper to her chest and laughs like it hurts. Because it does, God, it does.
The lake is glass in the morning her hands shake too hard to make tea.
Effie stares at her reflection in the pot lid as the water boils over, her face flushed, hair a soft mess around her cheekbones. No makeup, no wigs, and no sparkles, just her, just Effie.
She pours too much sugar and she drinks it anyway because it reminds her of when Haymitch did the same to comfort her after losing one of the kids.
The letter from Haymitch sits on the table like a bruise she keeps pressing. “I still do.”
He remembers and she hadn’t expected that. Or maybe she had, and that's what makes her stomach twist.
It’s the first time she’s heard someone say they thought of her at all in years.
The wind cuts colder that afternoon, and she can’t stop thinking about the Games.
Not the Capitol pageantry, the after , all the coffins, the silence in the elevators, the smell of blood on silk. She thinks of Chaff and Seeder. Of Peeta with trembling hands, of Johanna screaming in the hovercraft, Katniss with eyes like flint, the revolution itself.
She remembers Haymitch throwing a bottle at the wall after a reaping, glass raining down like confetti. She remembers curling her fingers around his sleeve and she also remembers him letting her.
She writes, again not on the fancy paper this time. Just a lined old notebook scraps she found in a drawer, her handwriting slightly crooked from the cold.
January 14, 76 AEV
Haymitch,
Do you ever dream about them?
The kids, the ones we sent. I remember all their names. I didn’t used to, I wasn’t allowed to, the Capitol made sure we learned how to forget them properly. But I do now.
I had a nightmare last night. Most of the were there. And the cornucopia was made of marble, and everyone applauded when the blood hit the ground.
I woke up shaking.
Is it always like this? Being alive, after?
— Effie
She places it in the mailbox with hands like frost.
That night, she doesn’t sleep.
In 74 AEV, Haymitch sits on the porch with his feet up, a half-empty bottle in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. He’s not supposed to smoke anymore because his lungs hate it, also his liver will fail any time now. But something about the wind off the lake feels like a dare, so he stands.
He opens her letter.
He doesn’t cry, Haymitch hasn’t cried in twenty years.
But he drinks the rest of the bottle and puts the cap back on out of respect.
Then he writes by moonlight, ink smudged where his fingers won’t stop twitching.
January 14, 74 AEV
Eff,
Yeah. I dream about them.
Every goddamn night.
You were always kinder than they let you be and that’s what I remember. You wore gloves, but you held things gently, you also cried during the 65th when that girl from 11 bled out slow. You hid it, but I saw. Y ou weren’t made for this and I think none of us were. I made it through by being angry, by destroying my body. Still do, I guess. But sometimes I wish I’d learned how to be sad instead. Maybe that would've hurt less.
It’s not always like this. But it is right now.
H.
The next day, when Effie opens the mailbox, there's something inside besides the letter.It’s flat. Carefully pressed between pages of an old notebook. A feather.
Gold. Slightly bent. One of hers, from that same damn dress, the one he kissed her in.
She remembers losing it at some gala years ago, and blamed a stylist. It must’ve gotten caught in his jacket pocket. And he’d kept it.
All this time.
She clutches it like it’s a bone from a past life.
That night, she builds a fire in the hearth, not because she’s cold the house is holding heat better now, but because something inside her aches to be warm.
She falls asleep in the armchair. The one he asked her not to move.
She dreams not of the Capitol, or the Games, but of the sound of his voice, quiet, gruff, asking her why she stayed all these years ago.
And she answers, finally, even in sleep.
Because you were the only one who ever saw me coming.
The mornings get quieter.
Not because the lake house has not changed, but because Effie stops filling it with noise, no radio, no muttering, no hollow clicks of old heels on wood. Just silence, and the occasional rustle of paper as she rereads Haymitch's last letter.
She reads it like scripture. Like maybe something in it holds the secret to living past pain.
“Maybe sadness hurts less than rage.”
She starts to fix things the little things her strength allows her to.
The sink in the kitchen doesn’t leak anymore. The handle on the bathroom door doesn’t jiggle. She lines the drawers with paper that smells faintly of lavender and folds her scarves in rainbow order, just like she used to in her old apartment in the Capitol, back when beauty felt like a nice thing instead of indulgence.
One afternoon, she finds an old, forgotten can of mint green paint in the cellar. She doesn’t think twice.
She simply paints the front door.
Just for herself, just for the way it looks under the early morning light.
Haymitch wakes to birds screaming outside the lake house window. He mutters something vicious at them and lumbers to the kitchen to make coffee. His head aches and he spilled whiskey on his journal the night before. Again.
He shuffles to the front door in socks that don’t match.
Stops cold.
The door is green.
He blinks and runs a hand down the paint.
It’s fresh, still slightly tacky under the nail of his thumb.
He didn’t paint this. He knows he didn’t paint this. No one’s been here. Except—
Effie.
A slow smile pulls across his mouth.
“Well, well,” he murmurs, stepping back inside. “Didn’t think you’d go domestic on me, princess.”
He writes that night. The fire crackles. For once, his hands don’t shake.
January 16, 74 AEV
Eff,
Green, huh? I always thought you’d paint it something dramatic. Gold. Blood red. Velvet black with a damn Capitol crest in rhinestones., or even that pink you loved to wear in wigs, but no. Mint green.
It suits you, it’s softer than you admit.
You’re changing this place. Bit by bit. And weirdly, it’s changing me, too.
I poured out three bottles yesterday, and i didn’t drink and didn’t even shake.
I think it scared me more than the drinking ever did.
I can’t remember the last time I wanted to be better.
But I do now, not for the war, not for the kids who needed me. For you. For the way you make this old house feel like maybe it’s allowed to be something else, you always made the places you were into feel like they were allowed to be something else, something hopeful.
— Haymitch
Effie reads it with trembling hands and cheeks flushed in the hearth’s glow. Something swells behind her ribs, not joy, exactly. And not sadness either. Something older that has lived quietly in her since she saw his name in a reaping envelope and whispered, not again.
She doesn’t write back right away but instead, she goes outside and plants a single tulip bulb by the porch steps.
A test.
If it blooms two years ago, she'll know.
Haymitch, 74 AEV
He almost misses it.
He’s dragging firewood up the steps when he sees the soft bump of turned soil. Bends down, frowns. Squints.
A tulip. One. Bright green stem, tight red bud like a secret not ready to open.
He sits hard on the top step, wood thudding behind him.
“Goddamn,” he says aloud. Then, quieter, “You really are here.”
He wants to write immediately, but he doesn’t know how to put this into words. So instead, he starts cleaning.
He scrubs the kitchen counters, vacuums the stupid rug, and he throws out five shirts and shaves his damn face. Just to see what she might notice.
Just to imagine what she’d say.
Effie, 76 AEV
She finds the kitchen cleaner than she left it, no spider webs, no bottle caps under the rug. The dust on the bookshelf she’d meant to wipe is already gone.
It startles her so deeply she sits on the floor and laughs until she cries.
They are rewriting each other in real time.
And she can’t take it anymore.
She writes again.
January 18, 76 AEV
Haymitch,
I want to meet you.
This is impossible. I know it is. But I keep thinking… if we’re touching the same space, at different times, isn’t there a moment we could reach out and overlap?
Maybe two years ago, you’ll come to the lake house on January 24th. Just sit on the porch. Stay for an hour. That’s all I ask. I’ll be here, waiting. Even if I don’t see you, maybe I’ll feel it.
And if by some miracle this works… I’ll be wearing that ridiculous gold dress. The one with the missing feather.
Also: I don’t know how to say this without sounding selfish, or cruel, or like someone who doesn’t understand what it’s like to carry grief in your bones every day, but I’m going to say it anyway: I’m afraid you won’t live long enough to meet me.
There, I said it. I wake up some mornings and I can’t breathe because the thought comes crashing down like ice, that maybe two years ago, in your time, your body was already giving up. That maybe the whiskey you drink to silence the ghosts is slowly making sure you’ll never get to see what it’s like to live without them.
I don’t blame you, I know what you’ve been through. I was there too, in a way, wearing gold and pretending I couldn’t feel anything, while everything around me bled. I know survival is messy and I know it doesn’t come clean or noble. But I also know this: I need you to fight.
I need you to fight for that wreck of a body you hate so much.
I need you to go to a doctor. To eat something, and to rest, hell, even ask Plutarch for help if needed.
Not just for me, don’t do it for me.
Do it for Katniss.
Do it for Peeta.
They’ll need you in a year or two. They came out of that war ripped to shreds and half-formed, and they’ll look around and find that most of the grown-ups are either dead or worse. But you’ll be there, you should be, you have to be. You’re one of the only people who’ll know what it feels like to crawl through fire and still find something worth living for on the other side.
Katniss won’t say she needs you, but she does. And Peeta, sweet, stubborn, gentle Peeta, he’ll remind you of everything good in the world.
And one day, maybe, if the stars don’t burn out first, I’ll be there too.
And we’ll sit on that porch together. An you’ll grumble. I’ll laugh. You’ll call me ridiculous. I’ll call you impossible. We’ll have tulips, and coffee, and a silence that doesn’t hurt anymore.
But none of that happens if you don’t make it.
So please. Please.
Choose to live.
Yours (because what else can I be, now?),
Effie
She places it in the box and closes the lid with both hands, heart hammering, back inside, she digs through her things and finds the dress wrinkled, faintly perfumed with a scent she doesn’t wear anymore and lays it out gently on the bed.
Then she waits.
January 20, 74 AEV
Effie,
I read your letter with shaking hands and a bottle I didn’t open. I need you to know that. I didn’t open it.
Do you know how long it’s been since I looked a truth in the eye and didn’t try to drown it?
You were right, damn you, about all of it.
My liver is shot to hell. I wake up coughing more days than not. There are mornings when my hands don’t stop shaking and my mouth tastes like ash. And sometimes I wonder if that’s just what dying feels like — slow and quiet, the kind no one notices.
And yes, I’ve thought about just letting it happen. I’ve thought about not fighting. The truth is, it’s easier. It’s easier to sit in the silence and let it all rot away. But then I think about your voice in those damn letters, how you still sound like sunlight, even when you're begging me to live. And I think about Katniss, the girl who never asked to carry the weight of an entire rebellion on her back and Peeta, who still tries to be kind in a world that keeps chewing him up.
And I think, hell, maybe I owe it to them, maybe I owe it to you. Or even to myself, I think I’ve spent so many years being punished by being alive, that I forgot what it felt to truly live.
So fine, you win.
I’ll go.
I’ll go to the lake house. On the date you choose. I’ll be there, there’ll be no whiskey. No ghosts. Just me.
If you want it, it’s yours.
Just… don’t be late, alright?
I don’t think I can take waiting another lifetime.
— H.
Effie chooses the date with trembling hands. Writes it down. April 7, 76 AEV. The date is sacred. She counts the days, prepares her dress, packs the letters he once wrote. She buys tulips. She arranges her travel two days early.
But the world has other plans.
The train gets delayed. A storm shuts down the road. Her driver cancels. She’s left stranded two towns away with nothing but her coat and a fistful of hope, she doesn’t sleep that night and barely eats.
By the time she reaches the lake house, the sun is setting, and the air is quiet. Too quiet. The mailbox is empty. The porch is cold. The rocking chair is still.
No Haymitch.
Just silence.
And the ghost of what almost was.
April 7, 76 AEV
Haymitch,
I missed you.
I missed you by hours, maybe less. I got here and the porch was empty and the chair was still and everything felt too quiet like you’d been here, and the house was holding its breath where you used to be.
I don’t know if you waited and left. I don’t know if time took you from me, or if I failed you, or if fate just played another one of its cruel little jokes, but I’m here now, and you’re not.
And I’m writing this shaking, because I don’t know what else to do.
You told me not to be late, and I was. And I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. But even if I was late today… I’m not giving up.
Because I love you.
There. It’s on paper now. No more hiding behind metaphors or careful language. I love you. Fiercely. Stupidly. Enough to write letters across time. Enough to wait.
I believe in you, Haymitch. Even now. I loved you for so long I almost forgot how it felt like to say these words, or to feel them or to try and let you know.
I believe you’re out there, somewhere, breathing. Trying. Maybe angry, and maybe hurt. But still here.
So here’s my promise:
Every year, on this day, April 7, I’ll come back to this house.
I’ll sit on the porch, I’ll bring coffee, maybe tulips if they’re in season. I’ll wait for you.
As long as it takes.
And maybe one year, you’ll walk up the path again.
And I’ll look up, and it won’t be empty anymore.
— Effie
April 7, 78 AEV
Effie sat on the porch of the lake house, wrapped in her old coat, now patched at the elbows. The coffee in her thermos had gone cold, untouched. The wind was sharp, tugging at the hem of her skirt, and the tulips she had brought, always the damn tulips had already begun to wilt.
She wasn’t even sure why she came anymore.
Two years had passed since she missed him and since she wrote that final letter and slipped it into the mailbox like a prayer. Every year, she came back and she waited but nothing ever happened. No sign. No word. Just the ache.
But this time, she didn’t bring a letter, or a pen, no paper either. Just her. If he came and she didn’t believe he would, not really then he would have to see her. Not the version he imagined in the future, not the woman in pink wigs with sharp lines, cheerful and polished with trembling hands, but the Effie that remained. A little softer, much sadder, but still here. Still his, if he wanted her.
She didn’t hear his footsteps at first, but she felt them.
A shift in the wind, and a breath that wasn’t hers but one she knew too well.
Then his voice, quiet, cracked and tired, like a dream crawling out of sleep.
“Didn’t think you’d still be waiting.”
She turned.
And there he was.
Haymitch. Looking older, more solid, and less haunted, somehow — though the ghosts still lingered around his eyes like smoke, he was thinner. The lines on his face had settled deep. His coat looked borrowed from another decade, but he was here, and he was real.
And her chest fractured.
She stood so fast the chair scraped across the porch. “You came,” she whispered, hands trembling like they used to during the Games.
He stepped closer. “I read the letter,” he said. “The one you left in the mailbox. Took me months to open it. Then two years to believe I still could.”
She laughed a sharp, broken sound. “I thought you were dead.”
“I was. For a while.” He swallowed hard, looking at her like she was a miracle and a punishment all at once. “But I got better.”
Tears burned her eyes, but she held them back. “I meant what I wrote. Every year, I came back. I-I didn't stop.”
He nodded. “I know.” A beat passed. “I did too. I came last year. You’d already left.”
That nearly undid her. “I stayed longer this time.”
He smiled, crooked and tentative, like it hurt. “Good.”
Then: silence. Heavy, but not empty.
Effie stepped forward. Her fingers hovered near his chest, unsure, waiting for permission. He didn’t speak, just reached for her hand and pulled it against his heart.
“I should’ve kissed you a thousand times more years ago,” he murmured.
“You did,” she said. “Just… not in the right year.”
So he kissed her now, slow, firm, desperate, not like a first kiss, because it wasn’t for them. Like a continuation of what they had left hanging. Like a long-postponed return. She clutched his face and pressed herself into him like she was afraid he’d dissolve, like he might still vanish if she let go.
And when they pulled apart, both of them breathless and shaken, he whispered, “I’m sorry I made you wait.”
She shook her head, tears finally falling. “You’re here, that’s all I ever wanted, you are all that I have ever wanted.”
And beneath that bruised sky, two people who had never quite belonged to their time finally found it, not in the letters, not in years of suffering, but in the messy, beautiful now.
Spring returned early that year, and the lake thawed, the tulips bloomed faster than Effie expected, and the silence between them had turned soft like always should have been, no longer aching, no longer a reminder of absence. Just quiet and peaceful, the kind of silence you lean into.
Haymitch stood barefoot in the garden, fingers stained with soil, pulling weeds beside her without complaint and that alone was a miracle. Every now and then he’d glance over, as if to make sure she was still there — and every time, she was.
They never talked much about the two years lost. Or the ones they survived before that. But sometimes, when the sun slipped low and the air smelled like coffee and damp wood, they would sit on the porch and wonder — why them? Why this house? Why the letters?
And one evening, she found it.
Buried under a loose floorboard in the back room, old and rotted through, a journal. Not hers. and not his either. Older and long before either of them. Yellowed pages, notes written in looping, careful script. Observations. Dates. Sketches of a mailbox.
“The house doesn’t keep time right,” it read.
“But it chooses.”
“Grief bends things. Love holds the thread.”
“If someone needs someone or something bad enough, the door opens.”
Effie sat with it in her lap for a long time and Haymitch watched her from across the room, one arm resting on the back of the couch. “Well,” he said, “that’s comforting.”
She looked up. “You think it was grief?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe we just refused to let go.”
She crossed the room and settled beside him, pressing her forehead to his shoulder. “We would’ve died if we hadn’t found each other.”
He was quiet a moment. Then, simply: “I did.”
She took his hand. Kissed the scarred knuckles. “You came back.”
He turned, kissed her cheek, then her jaw, then lowered slow and reverent, like he still wasn’t sure this was real. “So did you.”
And later, under soft sheets and fading moonlight, they curled around each other like roots growing into the same soil. He brushed her hair back and kissed the center of her forehead. She rested a hand over his chest, where the ghosts used to live. He was warm now.
She whispered, “If the house chose us…”
He kissed her shoulder. “Then it knew what the hell it was doing.”