My flight left in four hours.
I knew that because I’d checked my phone six times since sitting down on the stone bench at the edge of the plaza, my single carry-on wedged between my feet, the late-afternoon sun pressing warm and gold against the bougainvillea that climbed the colonial walls around me. Cartagena in January smelled like sea salt and frangipani and something older—something that had no business making a person feel this much.
I should have been in a taxi already.
Instead, I was holding a letter I’d found that morning in the lining of an old travel journal I hadn’t opened in three years. Folded into quarters, the crease lines soft with age, my name written on the outside in handwriting I would have recognized anywhere.
Adonis.
I hadn’t spoken that name out loud in a long time. I’d trained myself not to.
—
Three years ago, I’d come to Cartagena for the first time with a research fellowship and a bruised sense of self I was pretending was fine. Latisha Layne, twenty-eight, fluent in three languages, allergic to staying still. That was the version of me that arrived. I’d rented a room in a guesthouse two streets from the old city, and I’d spent my mornings in the archives and my evenings exactly here—at this plaza, at a small café with yellow shutters that opened onto the cobblestones.
Adonis Neblett had been sitting at the table beside mine on my third evening, reading a battered paperback and drinking something dark and cold. He was tall, unhurried, with the kind of stillness that made you want to know what he was thinking.
He’d looked up when I knocked my notebook off the table.
We’d talked until the café closed.
That was how it started. Quietly. The way things do when they’re going to mean something.
For six weeks, we were inseparable in the way that only happens when two people are both a little lost and too proud to admit it. Morning walks along the city walls. Afternoons in the shade of the plaza, arguing about history and laughing about nothing. Evenings that stretched long past when they should have ended.
I fell in love with him the way you fall asleep—slowly, and then all at once.
I never told him.
Because there was Aoife.
Aoife Farrell was Adonis’s ex. She’d shown up in the fourth week, Irish and vivid and completely unannounced, claiming she’d just happened to be passing through. I’d believed it then. I wasn’t sure I believed it now. She was warm toward me in that particular way that also managed to communicate very clearly that she and Adonis had a history I was not part of.
She wasn’t unkind. That was the worst part. She was lovely, actually.
But she laughed at his old jokes. She knew which side of the plaza he preferred. She ordered for him without asking and got it right.
I told myself I was imagining things.
I told myself it didn’t matter.
Then my fellowship ended, and I packed my bags, and I left without saying the thing I should have said. I told Adonis it had been wonderful. I told him I’d keep in touch. He held my gaze a beat too long at the airport, and I looked away first, and that was that.
I’d kept in touch for exactly two months before the messages got shorter and then stopped.
I’d told myself that was fine, too.
—
The letter.
I’d found it that morning while repacking my journal—I’d brought it back to Cartagena almost superstitiously, thinking it would help me write the last chapter of the book I’d been finishing for a year. The fellowship had turned into a manuscript. The manuscript had turned into a reason to return.
The letter had been tucked inside the back cover, slipped into a small interior pocket I’d forgotten existed. The handwriting on the outside was careful and deliberate.
Latisha.
I’d stood in the middle of my rented room for a full minute before I opened it.
The paper inside was dated three years ago. The last week of my fellowship. Before I’d left.
He’d written four paragraphs. I’d read them so many times that morning that I could have recited them now by heart.
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