Here’s the thing about Bobby: she’s annoyingly good at her job, which means she’s also annoyingly not home most of the time.

The handwritten letters started as a joke. A scrap of paper, hastily torn from a notebook, with a crude doodle of a heart and a quick reminder that you exist and that you’re at home, waiting, forehead pressed against the window, longing for her like some tragic heroine from a Jane Austen novel. (Okay, maybe not that dramatic, but the sentiment’s there.)

You’d tucked it in her bag alongside her sandwich (turkey, no mayo, don’t ask) and waited for her to find it. When she came home that night, her smile lingered a little longer than usual. She didn’t mention the note, of course. That would require vulnerability, and vulnerability wasn’t exactly Bobby’s forte. But she left her boots at the door instead of tracking mud through the house, which, in Bobby-speak, was practically a sonnet.

From there, letters became a ritual. You’d sit at the kitchen table in the morning, bleary-eyed and clutching your third cup of coffee, while the ink bled into the paper. The smell of toast burning in the toaster would waft through the air as you scribbled some sweet cringe nonsense about how her smile made you forget how much you hated mornings.

Bobby never said much about them. However, you knew she kept them, because one night you found a small stack tucked away in the drawer by her bed. It was the same drawer that held her pocket knife and half a packet of gum, peppermint to be specific.

She’d read them on her break, the grease on her hands would leave smudges on the paper. You hoped your lovesick spew of words would make her day a little less heavy. Spoiler, they did.