The Correspondent: A Novel by Virginia Evans - 55

TO: sybilvanantwerp@aol.com

FROM:stewartpbates@gmail.com

DATE: Oct 2, 2018 08:08 PM

SUBJECT: Felix

Hi Sybil,

I hope you’re doing well, enjoying your grandkids. Did you get my letter? I assume you’re angry with me, and you’d have a right to be, but you don’t know the whole story. Felix himself doesn’t know the whole story, but he is still unwilling to take my calls or texts, or open my emails. I would get on a plane, but I don’t even know where he’s staying. I imagine you think that by standing between the two of us you are protecting your brother, but it’s not the case. Felix and I need to talk. I’m almost certain that if we could just talk, I could apologize and explain, we could get the train back on the tracks.

This is what happened. I got to know a Frenchman too well. It was a mistake. Felix and I had been having some troubles. Felix was writing a long essay and it wasn’t going well. He had placement for it, and then the funding for the anthology fell through around the time he was finally breaking through his mental block, and he was disappointed. As you know, when the work is going well he is happy, and when it’s not, he becomes far-off, selfish, and sullen. It’d been months (or longer) of the latter and I was tired of it. We fought, he brought up marriage, and I said we had always agreed we wouldn’t.

Around that time I’d begun meeting this man for coffee or the occasional walk or glass of wine (we first met through a work project). I am going for transparency here, Sybil, so I admit it gave me a delicious feeling I knew I ought not to have, but I was angry with Felix and hurt, so I didn’t heed the internal warning sense. I became closer with this man (Luc) behind Felix’s back, only as friends, but it wasn’t that simple for him, I realized later. He was falling in love with me. He told me, but it wasn’t like that for me. In December Felix picked up my cell off the table because an alarm was going off for my medicine, and there was a text message from the man, and Felix went ballistic. I wasn’t, I am not, in love with the other man, but Felix didn’t believe that. He wouldn’t let me say a word in my defense so he doesn’t know that nothing came to pass between myself and Luc (once he kissed me, but I did put a stop to that), but again, I couldn’t convince Felix. He’s a skeptic, or superstitious or something. I love, and have always loved, your brother and when it all blew up with Felix seeing the message, all of that, whatever that was with Luc, was over. I flirted with fire and I got burned, but I’m not a fool. I was wrong, but I learned my lesson and I need you to help me find a way to reach Felix. Please, Sybil.

Stewart