Lost (but not Forgotten) Letters

            When I first visited the second-hand bookshop, I didn’t expect to find much. A simple book or two, just something to keep my occupied for the next couple of weeks. What I didn’t expect to find, however, was a collection of old letters and poems stashed in between the pages. You can imagine my surprise when I was lying in bed, wrapped up all cozy in my blankets, and as I opened the first page, a piece of paper fell out.

            At first, I didn’t pay much attention to it. The novel was used, the cover torn and scratched up, and it was obvious that some of the pages were bent. It was just an old bookmark, I thought. A receipt or something of the sorts. But as I kept reading, the further in I got, the more pages there were. They caught my attention, and it kept it. Written in hardly legible scrawl, addressed to a Margret and signed by a simple ‘B’, was a love letter.

            That first night, I stayed up until the sun could be seen again. The letters fascinated me. Eventually I did feel guilty about reading them; they did belong to someone else, whomever this Margret was. At some point or another, I decided that she deserved to have them back, so this time whenever I browsed through the writing, I didn’t feel as bad.

            The letters never had a last name. Nor did they have another name – whoever was writing them only signed off with that B. For the next five days all I did was wonder about them, and how to find Margret. I was lying in bed on a Sunday, at three o’clock in the morning, when the idea hit me. Flipping open the front panel, right there on the very first page, was an address. It was, coincidently, only a few blocks away.

            On my next day off, I went to visit this woman, the letters wrapped together by a rubber band, tucked under my arm. When she opened the door, she looked exactly how I imagined her. Older, wrinkled skin, curly white-gray hair, with small circular glasses perched on the end of her nose. She blinked up at me, pursing her lips for a moment, before asking if she could help me.

            “Yes ma’am,” I replied. “You wouldn’t, by any chance, be Margret?”

            There was never any surprise on her face. There was on mine, however, when she almost slammed the door in my face, shouting about how she already paid off her bills.

            “Ma’am, please, wait,” I interrupted her yelling, “I’m not here for any money. I was in a bookstore, and I think I found a book that belonged to you. It had these in them.” And I practically threw them at her.

            When she noticed the parchment, she froze. Her eyes widened, mouth forming an almost perfect ‘o’. Then she looked back up at me, tears forming behind the aged glasses.

            As it turned out, that ‘B’ was her husband. Before they even started dating, he would write her little letters, never having the guts to actually talk to her. At some point he must of, otherwise they would never have gotten married. They weren’t married for even fifteen years before he died.

            “The doctors don’t know what did it. One day, he just left me,” she explained. “We never had any children. He was all I had.”

            She had kept his letters in her favorite book. Somehow, after he died, it got misplaced, and ended up in that bookshop.

That night as I left old Margret’s home, I couldn’t help but feel ecstatic. Margret had lost the love of her life, but with my help, she was able to have a piece of him back.