Still Here

Title: Still Here

It started, as so many reckonings do, with a letter.

On the first truly warm morning of March, Harold Penn found an envelope slipped under the door of his basement flat in Whitmore Row. The name on the front was unmistakably his, in a script he hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. It was delicate, uncertain—like someone relearning how to write their own name.

He stared at it for a long time before opening it.

Inside was a single sheet of ivory paper and a train ticket. The letter read:

*Harold,

I’ve replayed our last words more times than I care to admit. I know what I did, and I know how much it must have hurt. I’m not writing to reopen the wound—I’m writing because I can’t carry the silence any longer.

There are things I never told you, things I never had the courage to say, and maybe I still don’t. But I’d like to try, if you’re willing. Come to Bleaker’s Hollow. Let me speak them while I still have the chance.

I want to make it right, or at least make it known.

—M.

Miriam.

He hadn’t spoken her name aloud in over two decades. And yet, it uncurled from his lips like a leaf unfurling in spring. She had vanished from his life in the kind of dramatic silence that seemed final, definitive. But now she was summoning him to Bleaker’s Hollow, of all places.

The place they’d last seen each other.

The place where everything had come undone.

The train ride was long, slow, and beautiful. Trees still skeletal from winter sped by like memories: bare, exposed, too much to look at directly. Harold wore the same overcoat he’d worn the last time he’d been to Bleaker’s Hollow, now fraying at the cuffs. He had aged gently, like an old paperback that still carried the scent of its first printing.

He arrived in the late afternoon. Bleaker’s Hollow hadn’t changed—still all crooked chimneys, ivy-choked fences, and that awful little bell above the inn door that jangled like a conscience. He walked to the address on the ticket envelope: a cottage at the edge of the woods, where the air smelled of moss and endings.

Miriam opened the door before he knocked. Her hair was shorter now, silver at the temples. She didn’t look older so much as rearranged.

"You came," she said.

Harold nodded.

"You asked."

Inside, the cottage was neat and peculiar, like her. Books organized by color. An old typewriter on the desk. The same blue vase he once bought her at a market in Lisbon. A photograph on the mantle caught his eye—a girl no older than six, framed in soft autumn light. A painting of a scorched gallery wall hung just above it.

They drank tea in silence. There were fig biscuits on the tray—ones she used to make when they still shared Sundays together.

Finally, she said, "I didn’t write to justify anything. I wrote because I remembered something that mattered. You." Her voice was thinner than he remembered, like the edge of something frayed.

"You hurt me," Harold said gently. "And I hurt you. Not in the same way. But I suppose... pain doesn’t care who started it."

She nodded, eyes brimming. "I left because I thought I was protecting you. From myself. I see now how arrogant that was."

Outside, the wind picked up. Leaves trembled on branches like held breath.

The weekend unfolded in fragments. They walked through the hollow’s trails, revisiting places once charged with youth and consequence. Miriam spoke about her years away. She had lived in Whitby, then St. Ives. She taught art to children. None of it had settled her.

"You ever meet someone called Margaret Bloom?" Harold asked suddenly, over toast and marmalade the second morning.

Miriam blinked. "The jam thief? I read about her. That was you? The woman who ran off with a fig jam and never came back?"

Harold laughed—a rare, full-hearted thing. "She rented the flat above me in Whitmore Row. Disappeared one night, left nothing but postcards and puzzle pieces in the bin."

"Sounds like someone we would've liked."

They laughed again. But under it, the quiet returned.

At the edge of Mill Pond, Miriam pulled a sealed envelope from her coat pocket.

"These are the things I never said. I wrote them when I thought I’d never see you again. I don’t know if you want them. But they’re yours."

Harold took it with trembling hands. He felt the familiar thud of dread and memory crawl up his chest.

He didn’t open it. Not yet.

That night, he couldn’t sleep. The sounds of the forest seemed louder than memory allowed. As he walked the hallway in slippers too worn for comfort, he noticed a collection of objects in Miriam’s study: pressed flowers, postcards from strange places, a worn book of Portuguese phrases, and a clipping from a paper: Fugitive Grandmother Spotted in York Cafe.

Margaret again.

He smiled, faintly.

On the desk lay the sealed envelope Miriam had given him by the pond. He sat down in the old armchair and opened it slowly, hands trembling.

The first letter inside was written in ink slightly faded, its corners softened by time. It spoke of missed birthdays, of anniversaries counted alone, of seeing his name in news clippings and not knowing whether to feel proud or broken. She wrote about the night of the fire, the fear in her lungs, the smell of burning canvas, and how she'd stood on the street outside unable to look back. How, in the aftermath, she believed that love meant disappearing.

The second letter was dated more recently. It was shorter, messier. A litany of ifs. If I’d stayed. If I’d called. If I’d let you decide.

By the end of it, Harold’s eyes burned. Not from sorrow alone—but from recognition. There was love in every clumsy line. Not a love that demanded, but one that confessed.

He leaned back, the silence now gentler. Then, he turned to her desk and found the old typewriter—next to it, a half-written letter:

I still dream of the day by the birch. And I wonder if I ever stopped loving you. Maybe this time, we won’t run.

In the morning, they sat by the fire. Miriam handed him a second letter, unsealed.

"I was going to burn it. I think it’s better if you read it."

He did. The words were not elegant, but painfully honest. As he read, fragments of their shared history cracked open in his mind: the whispered plans for a child that never arrived, the gallery blaze that Miriam never forgave herself for, the nights they spent unable to speak, trapped under the weight of dreams that soured.

He folded the letter gently.

"We can’t fix any of that."

"No."

"But we’re still here. That must mean something."

Over the next week, Harold remained in Bleaker’s Hollow. He learned the paths again. He helped Miriam clean out the garden shed. They planted herbs in the window box and cleared the ivy from the back gate. On the last morning before spring, they dug a shallow hole near the old stone wall and lowered in a sapling—a fig tree.

"To sweetness that grows late," Miriam said.

They stood back, dirt on their hands, the tree just a branch and a promise. Harold watched the way its thin limbs reached upward despite the chill still in the air. "Figs take years to fruit, don't they?" he said.

Miriam nodded. "They do. But when they finally do, it’s worth the wait."

He looked at her, then back at the sapling. "So we're planting something that forgives us for not being ready sooner."

She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

Later, in town, they visited a café. In the window was a chalkboard sign:

"Fresh Scones & Fig Jam (Margaret’s Recipe)"

Harold grinned. "She made it after all."

"Looks like it."

And then, with sunlight spilling through the windows and their tea steaming gently between them, Harold reached across the table and took Miriam’s hand.

"Let’s not miss this train."

Some debts aren't meant to be paid. Only acknowledged.

And sometimes, making amends wasn’t about changing the past.

It was about staying in place long enough to plant something new.