The Years Between Us

Daniel had been awake all night.

He stopped calling Anna's phone sometime around three in the morning. There was no point anymore. It went straight to voicemail every time, and every time he still listened for the two seconds before her recorded voice began, hoping, absurdly, that this would be the call that didn't fail.

Hi, you've reached Anna, I'm probably ignoring you on purpose—

He hung up before the joke could finish. He knew the joke. He'd heard it a thousand times. He didn't need to hear it again tonight, not like this, not as a stand-in for the real thing.

Still, he kept the phone in his hand, screen up, like it might do something on its own if he just waited long enough.

Maybe she'd call.

Maybe she'd walk through the door, laughing at how worried he'd gotten, rubbing the small of her back the way she'd taken to doing these past weeks, complaining that their daughter had used her bladder as a trampoline again.

Maybe there was some perfectly ordinary explanation for the fact that his pregnant wife had disappeared yesterday afternoon without even stepping into the shoes waiting for her by the door.

The police had no explanation. Neither did he. Neither did Anna's parents, or her sister, or the woman from her prenatal class who called at midnight sounding more frightened than made sense to his panicked brain. No one knew anything. No one had seen anything. One moment she had been there, mid-morning light in the kitchen with her hand pressed flat to her belly, and then she simply hadn't been.

She was seven months along. She'd spent that entire morning wincing every few minutes, one hand splayed under her ribs, muttering okay, okay, I hear you to a daughter who wasn't due for another two months. Daniel knew she was frightened of the birth—of everything going wrong, the way it sometimes did, the way she'd read about in too many books she probably shouldn't have read. That was what made this impossible to hold in his head. She wouldn't have left. Not like this. Not without her coat, not without a note, not seven months pregnant and scared of what was coming.

He had spent the night doing the thing he swore he wouldn't do; wondering whether he would ever see her face again.

Daniel rested his chin in his hand at the kitchen table, and his eyes drifted, not for the first time, to the ultrasound held to the fridge by a magnet shaped like a lemon. Tiny. Grey and grainy. A shape he still had to be told was a hand. Anna had cried the first time she saw it, and pretended she hadn't, and then cried again when he pretended not to notice.

There was a knock at the door.

His heart seized. He was on his feet before he'd finished the thought.

"Anna?"

He crossed the hallway too fast, caught his hip on the side table, didn't feel it.

Another knock, softer this time, almost apologetic.

He opened the door, and disappointment dropped through him like something falling down a stairwell.

A stranger stood outside. A young man, maybe thirty, a large hard-sided case set on the ground by his feet. He looked nervous in a way that didn't match the hour. And it was too early for solicitors, too late for anything good.

"Daniel Arbell?"

"Yes." His own voice sounded far away to him.

The man studied him for a long moment, as if checking his face against something.

"My name is Benny."

Daniel waited. The porch light hummed faintly overhead.

Benny looked down at the case.

"I have something for you."

Daniel's stomach tightened around nothing. "What?"

Benny crouched and opened the case partway, just enough.

Letters. Dozens of them. No, it was more than that. Hundreds, easily. Bundles tied with ribbon gone the color of weak tea, some envelopes yellowed soft with age, others gone brittle and dark at the corners, curling like dry leaves, a few so fragile-looking Daniel thought a breath might turn them to dust.

He stared.

One sat near the top, and his name was written across the front of it in handwriting he knew better than his own. He knew it from grocery lists stuck under a magnet, from birthday cards, from a note once left on the bathroom mirror in lipstick that said don't forget you love me on a morning they'd fought about nothing.

His knees nearly went.

"Where did you get that?"

Benny looked up at him. "Family."

"Who are you?"

A pause. "Your great-great—something—grandson. Five generations, give or take."

Daniel stared at him.

"What?"

"I know how it sounds."

"You're my what?"

"Your descendant."

Daniel laughed once, a short, ugly sound with no humor in it at all.

"Get out of here."

He was already swinging the door shut when Benny called out, "Wait—please."

Daniel stopped. Turned. The man looked sincere, in the specific, unnerving way that made lies harder to spot. "That's impossible."

Benny nodded, like he'd expected that answer and had made his peace with it long before he ever knocked.

"It should be."

He lifted the top envelope with both hands, carefully, the way you'd hold something that had survived longer than it had any right to. "We've carried this in the family a long time."

Daniel's eyes went back to the handwriting. He couldn't look away from it now that he'd seen it.

Anna's.

"She's okay?" His voice cracked on the word.

Something shifted in Benny's face.

"She was."

Daniel's breath caught somewhere behind his ribs and stayed there.

"What does that mean?"

Benny didn't answer right away. He turned the envelope over instead. Something was written on the back in the same hand, fainter, pressed harder into the paper, like she'd wanted it to last.

Deliver only on September 2nd, 2026.

"These were meant to reach you today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Today."

"Why?"

"Because that's what she asked for."

Daniel looked at him. "Anna asked your family to do this?"

"Our family," Benny said, gently correcting.

Daniel nodded, though he didn't feel it—his body simply moved on its own, a few beats behind whatever his mind was doing. When he finally spoke, the word barely made it out. "Why?"

Benny gave him a strange look, something between disbelief and sympathy.

"Because she knew this would happen. She was in the past, Daniel. Her memories with her. All she wanted was for you to know."

Daniel felt sick. He wanted, in the same instant, to slam the door and to fall to his knees on the porch.

Instead, quietly: "How old are these letters?"

Benny glanced into the case. "Some of them about two centuries."

The world tilted, just slightly, the way a room does when you stand up too fast.

Daniel's hand found the doorframe.

Benny kept talking, low and careful, like he was easing Daniel down onto solid ground one word at a time.

"They've been kept safe in this family. Cared for. Just for you. Ever since your she understood what had happened to her and sat down and wrote the first one. They've passed from parent to child, generation to generation, always with an explanation of what they were and why they mattered."

"Why didn't you bring them sooner?"

He looked almost pained to say it. "Because I was told not to."

"By who?"

"My mother. She was told by her father. Back and back."

Daniel stared at the date on the envelope again. September 2nd. Today. The day after Anna vanished.

"You said you're my… descendant."

"Yes."

"But Anna is—"

"The mother of your daughter. Who is also my ancestor."

Daniel went still.

The words landed harder than he'd braced for, though he hadn't known to brace for anything like this at all.

"Our daughter was born?"

Without me there, he thought, and it hurt in a way he had no name for. Anna had said it herself, more than once, half-joking and half not—I don't know if I can do this without you—and he had promised her, every time, that she wouldn't have to.

"Yes," Benny said.

"She grew up?"

He nodded. "She had children. They had children. Eventually, I was born."

Daniel looked down at the case. Suddenly he didn't want to touch it, or any of the letters inside it.

All those people.

Generation after generation, unspooling out from one impossible afternoon in his kitchen.

His unborn daughter. His grandchildren, and theirs. And Anna. Anna, somewhere at the root of all of it, the reason any of these people existed to write a single word.

"How far back was she? You said two centuries?"

"Yes. 1824."

Daniel had to sit down on the porch step. His legs simply stopped being willing to hold him.

It was too far back to feel real. He tried to remember anything about that year and came up with almost nothing, just a vague, cold sense of before—before medicine, before anything that would have helped her, before a world built for a woman alone with a baby and no explanation for either. It couldn't have been easy. It couldn't have been kind.

He looked up at Benny.

"So she made it. Even back then. In that world."

"Yes."

"Did she—" His voice broke clean in half. "Was she happy?"

Benny's eyes dropped to the letters, then came back up.

"She figured it out. But every one of these is written to you. You were the reason she never let go of who she'd been. I've always thought that was a good thing, for what it's worth."

Daniel looked at the hundreds of envelopes, and one more caught his eye, a different hand this time; rounder, uneven, unmistakably a child's.

For Dad.

His hands started to shake.

"I can't read this one."

"No one's making you."

Benny set the case down gently at Daniel's side, the way you'd set down something sleeping.

"But there are a lot of them."

Daniel laughed, wet and broken. "I can see that."

"Letters from Anna, mostly. Some from your daughter, later on. Eventually letters from her children too. Family records. A few photographs, further down."

He paused.

"All of it's yours."

Daniel reached for the first envelope. His name. Her handwriting. He opened it slowly, half afraid the paper would give way in his hands.

A single sheet inside, the ink having gone a soft brown after all so many years.

Daniel,

If this reaches you, then my plan worked. It also means I disappeared yesterday, and I need you to know something before you decide to hate me for it: I didn't choose to leave.

His breath went ragged. He kept reading.

I'm still very pregnant, wherever I am. I don't know exactly what I'm doing yet, but I have to move forward — there isn't another option, not for me and not for her. I've decided to name her Josie. Yes, after your suggestion. Don't let it go to your head.

There was a break in the writing, a small gap where the pen must have lifted and stayed lifted a while.

Then:

I'm sorry you have to keep going without me. But please fight, the way I'm going to fight. I mean it, Daniel. Both of us, on either end of this. Fight.

Daniel pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. Josie, he thought, and something in his chest cracked open around the name.

"She knew," he said. "She knew she'd never come back."

Benny nodded.

Daniel looked up at him, eyes stinging. "Why did she wait? We could have stopped it. We could have—"

"She had to wait."

"Why?"

"Because it had to happen the way it happened." Benny's gaze went to the case again, softer now. "If you'd known beforehand, you might have tried to stop it. And if you'd stopped it, this family doesn't exist. These letters don't exist. And eventually, neither do I."

Daniel understood.

Not completely. Not in a way that made the ache in his chest any smaller.

But enough. Enough to know that everything in that case had cost her everything, on purpose, for the sake of everyone who came after.

He looked at the case again, differently now.

"I get to keep this?"

Benny managed something close to a smile. "I'd be glad if it stopped taking up space in my attic, honestly."

Daniel picked the For Dad envelope back up. His daughter's handwriting—a daughter who, as far as he knew, hadn't been born yet, who had vanished from this world tucked inside her mother only yesterday. She had grown up somewhere he couldn't picture, in a century he could barely name. She had lived. Loved. Been loved back. Had children of her own, who'd had children of their own, who had, without ever meeting him, kept his wife's letters safe across two hundred years just so he could open a door on one particular morning and receive them.

Daniel held the envelope against his chest without opening it. Not yet. He wasn't ready yet.

He looked at Benny.

None of it made sense. And yet— "Thank you."

Benny shook his head.

"Don't thank me. Thank her. She's the one who wanted you to be able to close this."

That was right. It had always been right, about Anna. She'd been the strong one, the one who held things together when they threatened to come apart, even when she pretended otherwise. It was one of the first things he'd loved about her. Even torn out of her own life and dropped into a world that owed her nothing, she had lived, and raised a child, and made sure, somehow, that the thread back to him was never fully cut.

Somewhere in the past, in ink gone soft with age, she was still speaking to him.

Daniel reached for another envelope.