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How can you reunite with someone you were never united to in the first place?
    Ella walked in the door a few minutes after I hung up the phone.
    "What happened?" she said, closing the door.
    "Detective called."
    "A detective? For what?"
    "To reunite me with my long lost father. What do they think this is? Some kind of Hallmark special?"
    She reached for my hand. "Calm down. I've never seen you act like this."
    There. It happened. The flaws underneath bubbled at the surface, desperate to erupt. I shoved them back inside. Smiled. Pulled her into my body and hid my face in her hair.
    "Let's get married now."
    "I want to do things properly, Gavin. You know that. I want the first time we sleep in this house together to be when we come back from our honeymoon. And I want our wedding to be something we remember with fondness, not something rushed because we want to turn the page."
    "You are a modern Jane Austen, huh?"
    "Trying to be."
    "Most people are living together without getting married nowadays."
    "Not interested." She pulled away from my arms and forced me to look into her eyes. Her finger pressed into my lips. "I know when these things produce real smiles. And I know when they're fake."
    I sat on our new white couch. "Come here."
    She sat on the opposite side of the couch and draped her feet over my legs. I rubbed her ankles and battled whether to give her the letter in my pocket. I carried all three letters with me every day. Only took them out of my pocket to wash my pants.
    "Let me read the first one." I'm not sure whether I loved or hated that she read my mind. Maybe both, depending on the circumstance.
    I pulled the first two letters from my pocket. Those stayed in my back left pocket, while the unopened one lived in my right pocket. Alone. Not a single tear in the seal.
    "Count to three, take a deep breath, and hand it to me." 
    "There's something I need to tell you first."
     

Chapter Five
     
    After a long and exaggerated breath, I looked at her and searched for the words to say what I felt. That didn’t always come easy to me. A lover of words and books, sometimes too many letters clamored my brain. I couldn’t piece them together into something nice. I needed to try though. For her sake. So, I opened my mouth to tell her what only half of me wanted to say.
    "Ella," I said, hands sweating. "When I saw you in that coffee shop my life changed. In middle school and my first year of high school people thought I was the biggest geek ever. Around my junior year I stopped hiding behind books and paint brushes and pretended to be fun and outgoing. I didn't actually have fun and I was still shy inside. All the girls thought I was some kind of god, and occasionally I'd use them to satisfy some bruised part of my ego, but it all got old. I hated that life.
    "Then I saw you. That moment changed my life. I realized that I didn't want to party and drink beer while standing on my head. I didn't want to use girls who were just as broken as I was. I wanted life.
    "When you smiled at me from the table by that window, you showed me . . . I can't even find the words. All I know is I wanted to be a better man than I was. I wanted to be me. Myself. The part of me hidden inside that no one saw. And I wanted someone to love me for that person, not the person I pretended to be.”
    "You know," she said. "I feel the same. Except when I saw you I went a little crazy. Because of the car accident and my lack of organization, I lost so much. So I set out to become as organized and detailed as possible. I thought it would help me find you. If I made every choice with precision everything would be perfect. I'd find you. And it would all be wonderful. Only it didn't work. You found me because everything around me fell apart. I actually had to lose the Ella I had been and resurrect the Ella that died in order for love to find me. It's almost as though I wasn't ready. When I finally let go of my obsession with finding you, you came to me."
    "Well.