When I walked into the post, the smell of stale coffee and floor wax hit me immediately. Art was sitting behind the laminate counter, reading a newspaper. I signed the donation slip with my old, shaky handwriting.

I don’t even know why, but instead of writing Clara Henderson, I wrote Clara Briggs. Maybe because those uniforms belonged to a different era.

And then Art read the name. And he called for Eddie.

Eddie limped toward the counter. His boots made a dull clicking sound on the linoleum. He set his coffee mug down next to my duffel bag, his hand trembling so badly the dark liquid spilled over the rim. “Clara,” he said again. His voice was deeper than I remembered, but the way he said my name was identical to the letters. “Art told me some lady brought in a bag of old gear, but I didn’t think it was you.”

“You’re alive,” I said. My jaw felt locked. I could hear my own pulse in my ears. “I thought you died in seventy-one. The letters stopped. I wrote to you, Eddie. I wrote three times.”

Eddie looked down at the counter. He rubbed his forehead with his thick, calloused thumb. “I know,” he whispered. “I didn’t die, Clara. I got sent home with shrapnel in my leg in December of seventy-one. But when I got back to Kentucky, my mother had a whole stack of your letters sitting in her cedar chest.”

He paused, his eyes wet as he looked at me. “She didn’t give them to me. She thought you were a distraction. She told me you had married some boy from your hometown and moved away. She actually wrote a letter back to your post office box, pretending to be me, telling you to stop writing.

She thought she was saving me from getting soft while I was over there.”

My stomach dropped. I felt sick. “She did what?” I whispered.

“She thought it was the right thing to do,” Eddie said, his voice flat with a sad, tired logic. “In her head, she was keeping me alive. She thought if I had a girl waiting for me, I’d make a mistake. She kept those letters hidden until she died five years ago. I found them when we were cleaning out her house in Bowling Green.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn leather wallet. He opened it and took out a folded piece of lined notebook paper. The edges were soft and grey from being handled too many times. “I’ve carried this with me since seventy-two,” he said, sliding it across the counter. “It was the last letter you sent. The one where you told me about your mother burning the pot roast.”