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**June 3rd**

Dear Friend,

I don't know your name yet, but I'm writing to you anyway. The woman at the community center said that's how it works—you send a letter into the void and hope someone catches it. I'm not good at hope, but I'm trying.

My name is Martin Schaefer, and I am sixty-two years old. I live in Duluth, Minnesota, in a house that's too big since Clara died three years ago. I work at the public library downtown, shelving books mostly, though they let me run a reading group on Thursdays for anyone who shows up. Usually it's four people. Sometimes it's seven. Once it was just me and Mrs. Kaplan, and we talked about her grandson instead of the book.

I want to tell you something I've never told anyone, because maybe that's what pen pals are for—saying the true things to someone who can't see your face when you say them.

When I was seventeen, I told my parents I wanted to be a veterinarian. I said it at dinner, right there between the meatloaf and the boiled potatoes, and my father put down his fork and smiled. Actually smiled. My father didn't smile much. He worked at the iron ore plant and came home with dust in the creases of his face. But that night he smiled and said, "That's good, Martin. That's real good. Helping things."

The lie was that I didn't want to be a veterinarian at all. I wanted to be a dancer. I'd been taking ballet classes in secret for two years, riding my bike eight miles to a studio in Superior where nobody knew me. My teacher, Miss Olenka—she was from Russia, or said she was—told me I had something. "Beautiful lines," she said, touching my shoulder blade. "You understand the music."

But it was 1979, and I was a boy in a mining town, and I knew what words followed boys who danced. So I said veterinarian instead, and my father smiled, and I let him keep smiling.

I never went to veterinary school. I went to community college for library science instead, which was close enough to something practical that nobody asked too many questions. But here's the strange part—the lie calcified. It grew into my bones like you said, like something that started soft and became structure. Now when people ask me about my life, about the path I didn't take, I sometimes talk about how I "almost became a vet." I say it casually, at parties or in the grocery store line, and it sounds true. It sounds more true than the real truth, which is that I wanted to move the way music moves, that I wanted to be looked at and have people see something beautiful.

I'm telling you this because I'm sixty-two years old and my father's been dead for fifteen years and I still can't say out loud, except to you now, that I wanted to dance. That some part of me still wants to.

Do you carry anything like that? Some true thing you buried so deep it became a fossil?

I make the world make sense by believing that it's never too late to say the true thing, even if you can't do the true thing anymore. My knees are bad now. But I still go to the performing arts center downtown when the ballet comes through. I sit in the back row, in the dark, and I watch bodies do what mine never got to do. And sometimes, walking home afterward, when there's nobody on the street, I do a small movement—nothing fancy, just a relevé or a tendu—and I feel seventeen again, riding my bike through the Minnesota summer, convinced that Miss Olenka could see something in me that I couldn't see in myself.

I'd like to know what you see when you look at yourself. I'd like to know what you had to put down to pick up the life you're carrying now.

Please write back, if you want to. If you don't, I understand that too.

Yours in hope (I'm practicing),

**Martin**

**June 18th**

Dear Martin,

Your letter has been sitting on my kitchen table for five days. I've read it maybe a dozen times. I keep stopping at the part about you doing a tendu on an empty street, and every time I have to put it down and walk away for a minute.

My name is Diane Soto. I'm fifty-six years old, and I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in an apartment that overlooks a parking lot where teenagers practice skateboard tricks at night. The sound of wheels on concrete has become a kind of lullaby. I work as a medical transcriptionist from home, typing up other people's symptoms and diagnoses, their broken bones and irregular heartbeats. I'm very fast. 940 keystrokes per minute. I won the regional competition three years running before I stopped entering.

You asked if I carry something buried. I do.

When I was nineteen, I had a daughter. Her name was Rebecca, though I only knew her for three days. I was a sophomore at UNM, living in a dormitory, and I had hidden the pregnancy under baggy flannel shirts and lies about gaining weight from cafeteria food. 1987. My mother had just remarried after my father left, and she was so happy, Martin. She was finally happy. I couldn't take that from her with my mistake.

So I had Rebecca alone, or mostly alone—there was a nurse who held my hand and didn't ask questions. And then I signed papers, and a couple from Colorado took her home, and I went back to my dorm room and told my roommate I'd had the flu.

The lie I told myself was that I was giving her a better life. Two parents. A house. Stability. All the things I didn't have. And maybe that part was even true. But the lie underneath that lie was that I would forget. That I could close that door and it would stay closed.

I'm fifty-six years old, and every November 14th I bake a cake. I don't tell anyone why. My ex-husband used to think it was strange, me making a cake on a random Thursday in November and just sitting there with it. We divorced for other reasons, but maybe that was part of it too—all the things I couldn't say piling up between us like furniture.

Rebecca would be thirty-seven now. I wonder if she likes cake. I wonder if she got my hands—I have long fingers, good for piano, though I never learned to play. I wonder if she ever thinks about the woman who had her and whether that woman thinks about her, and I want to tell her yes, yes, constantly, in the space between heartbeats.

You asked what I see when I look at myself. Mostly I see someone who got very good at typing other people's words because she was afraid of her own. Someone who turned herself into a machine—input, output, efficiency—because machines don't have to feel things.

But here's what I make myself believe, Martin: that somewhere in Colorado or wherever she ended up, Rebecca is loved. That she had birthday parties and someone who taught her to ride a bike and helped her with algebra homework. That I gave her that, even if I couldn't give her me.

And here's the other thing—I joined this pen pal program because my therapist said I need to practice being honest. Not transcribing someone else's truth, but speaking my own. Your letter was the first one they matched me with, and when I read about you doing ballet steps on empty streets, I thought: there's someone who understands that some truths are too big to say in daylight.

So I'm saying it now, to you, in this letter: I had a daughter and I loved her and I gave her away, and all three of those things are true at the same time.

Thank you for going first. Thank you for showing me it was possible.

Yours in practiced honesty,

**Diane**

**June 27th**

Dear Diane,

I've been sitting with your letter for longer than five days. I've been sitting with it for nine, and I still don't know if I have the right words, but you taught me that maybe the right words don't exist. Maybe there are only true words.

Every November 14th you bake a cake. Diane, that's not a lie. That's love with nowhere to go, so it goes into flour and sugar and the heat of an oven. That's love that kept beating even after they took her away.

I'm sorry your ex-husband couldn't see that. I'm sorry he couldn't see you.

Clara would have understood. My wife—she died of pancreatic cancer, and it was fast, which everyone said was a mercy, but I'm not sure mercy is the right word for watching someone you love disappear in four months. Near the end, when she was still lucid but we both knew, she asked me about Miss Olenka. I don't know how she knew. I'd never told her. But Clara had a way of knowing things.

"Did you love her?" she asked. We were in the hospice room, and it was snowing outside, and her hand in mine was so light it barely felt like a hand anymore.

"No," I said. "I loved what she let me be."

Clara nodded. She was quiet for a while, and then she said, "I'm sorry you didn't get to be that."

I told her it was okay. I told her I had a good life. I had her, and we had thirty-eight years together, and our son James who lives in Seattle now with his husband, and what more could a person want?

But here's what I didn't say: I was grateful for the lie. I was grateful I became the man who could marry Clara and be James's father. If I'd told the truth at seventeen, I don't know who I would have become. Maybe someone braver. Maybe someone lonelier. Maybe someone who danced in lights instead of in darkness, but who never knew what it was like to hold James when he was two hours old and feel his whole tiny heart beating against my chest.

I think about Rebecca sometimes now, the daughter you held for three days. I think about how she exists in the world because you made an impossible choice. Maybe she's a doctor or a teacher or someone who also types 940 keystrokes per minute. Maybe she bakes cakes too, and doesn't know why she feels like celebrating on November 14th.

Or maybe—and Diane, I hope you'll forgive me for saying this—maybe someday she'll come looking. There are databases now, websites. James is always showing me things on his computer. People find each other.

I'm not saying you should look. I'm not saying anything except that thirty-seven years is a long time to carry something alone, and you're not alone anymore. At least not on Thursdays when you read this.

You said you see yourself as a machine, but machines don't bake cakes for ghosts. Machines don't read letters a dozen times. Machines don't practice honesty because it's hard.

What I see when I read your words is someone who has been holding her breath for thirty-seven years. Someone who loved her mother enough to swallow her own life. Someone who loved Rebecca enough to let her go. That's not a machine, Diane. That's someone who kept choosing love even when love meant losing everything.

Here's something I've never told anyone: after Clara died, I stopped going to the ballet. I couldn't sit in that dark theater anymore without her alive somewhere in the world. It felt obscene, somehow, to want beautiful things when she was gone.

But last week—the same day your letter arrived, actually—the arts center was doing a free outdoor performance in the park. Just a small thing, local dancers, college kids mostly. And I walked past on my way to the library, and there was a girl, maybe twenty, doing fouettés on a portable platform. Just spinning and spinning, and her face was so concentrated, so completely inside the music.

I stopped walking. I stood there with your letter in my coat pocket, and I watched her spin, and I thought: Clara would want me to see this. She would want me to still let beauty in.

So I stayed for the whole performance. And when it was over, I went home and I put on some Tchaikovsky—Clara's favorite—and I did a complete combination in my living room. Plié, tendu, rond de jambe. My knees cracked like gunshots and I'm sure I looked ridiculous, sixty-two years old in my kitchen with the blinds closed. But I did it.

I did it because you told me about Rebecca.

I did it because you showed me that we don't bury the truth to kill it. We bury it to keep it safe until we're strong enough to dig it up again.

Maybe that's what we're doing now, Diane. Excavating ourselves. Dusting off the fossils and seeing what ancient, beautiful things we used to be.

940 keystrokes per minute. That's extraordinary. I type maybe forty, and half of them are mistakes.

What else are you extraordinary at?

Yours in excavation,

**Martin**

P.S. - Does Rebecca know her birth date? I only ask because if she ever goes looking, November 14th is where she'll start. And when she does, there will have been thirty-seven cakes waiting for her. Thirty-seven small ceremonies of remembering. That means something. I think that means everything.

**July 8th**

Dear Martin,

I've been crying for twenty minutes and I need to just start writing before I talk myself out of it again.

Clara knew. Of course she knew. That's what love is, isn't it? Seeing the parts of someone they think they've hidden away and loving them anyway. Loving them *especially*.

When you wrote about her asking about Miss Olenka, about you doing a combination in your kitchen with Tchaikovsky playing—Martin, I had to get up and open all the windows in my apartment. I needed more air. Not because it hurt, but because it was too beautiful, and I've trained myself not to let beautiful things all the way in.

You asked what else I'm extraordinary at. Nobody's asked me that in so long I almost didn't know how to answer.

But here's the truth I excavated: I'm extraordinary at birds.

I know that sounds strange. Let me explain.

After Rebecca, I couldn't sleep. For months, years really, I'd wake up at 3 a.m. and just lie there in the dark, and the silence was so loud it felt like drowning. So I started going outside. Just walking through the empty streets of Albuquerque, watching the sky change.

And I started noticing the birds. How the mourning doves began their calls right at dawn, that low whooo-OO-oo-oo that sounds like loneliness made into music. How the ravens gathered in parliament at the tops of telephone poles, gossiping. How the roadrunners—yes, we actually have roadrunners here—skittered across the pavement like tiny velociraptors with somewhere important to be.

I bought a field guide. Then another. Then binoculars. Now I have seven notebooks filled with sightings, sketches, behavioral notes. I know the migratory patterns of thirty-four species. I can identify a bird by its call from three blocks away. Last spring, I watched a pair of lesser goldfinches build a nest in the Chinese elm outside my window, and I documented every single day from the first twig to the day the fledglings left.

I've never told anyone this because it seems like such a strange, small thing to be good at. My ex-husband used to call it my "bird thing" with that tone that made it sound like a symptom. But it's not small to me, Martin. Those birds kept me alive. They gave me a reason to wake up at dawn. They taught me that even after you've lost everything, the world keeps singing.

You asked about Rebecca and databases. I registered with three of them. Two years ago, on her thirty-fifth birthday. I sat at my computer for four hours before I could click "submit." The woman at the registry said that if she's looking, they'll contact both of us. They'll facilitate. That's the word she used—facilitate. As if finding your daughter is something that can be made easy.

She hasn't looked. Or she looked and decided she didn't want to know. Or she's happy and doesn't need a medical transcriptionist from Albuquerque who gave her away to disrupt her life with feelings.

But here's what I think about on November 14th when I'm baking that cake: maybe she's walking down a street somewhere in Colorado or California or wherever she ended up, and a mourning dove calls, and for just a second she feels something she can't name. A tug. A recognition. Maybe she doesn't know it's me she's feeling, some genetic echo of all my 3 a.m. walks and careful observations. But maybe it's there anyway, in her bones, this thing I gave her besides life. This ability to notice what survives.

I'm extraordinary at surviving, Martin. That's the other thing.

I survived giving away the person I loved most. I survived a marriage that made me smaller. I survived becoming so efficient at transcribing other people's pain that I forgot I had my own. And I'm surviving this—learning to speak after years of silence, learning to let your words in, learning to believe that at sixty-two and fifty-six we're still allowed to want things.

You asked if I'd forgive you for suggesting Rebecca might come looking. Martin, there's nothing to forgive. You're the first person who's ever suggested it as a possibility instead of a pipe dream. Everyone else—my therapist, my sister, the women in my book club—they're all so careful. They say things like "you did what you had to do" and "she's probably happy" and "you have to let it go." But you said maybe she'll come looking. Maybe she exists and thinks about me. Maybe thirty-seven cakes mean something.

I needed someone to say maybe.

This morning, I saw a vermilion flycatcher in the cottonwood by the parking lot. They're not common here—usually down by the river—and when I see one it feels like a visitation. This one was so red it looked like someone set a tiny fire in the branches. And I thought about you doing fouettés in your living room, about Clara wanting you to let beauty in, about how we spend so much of our lives making ourselves smaller and quieter and then one day we're fifty-six and sixty-two and maybe there's still time to take up space.

So I'm going to tell you something I've been thinking about since your last letter. There's a community education center here that offers classes. Watercolor painting, conversational Spanish, that sort of thing. And they have a birdwatching class. For beginners. And even though I'm not a beginner, I've been thinking about teaching it.

I haven't taught anything since I was a TA in college, before Rebecca. But I know these birds, Martin. I know them the way you know ballet. And maybe it's time to stop just surviving and start showing people what I see.

Is that crazy? Teaching at fifty-six when I've spent thirty years hiding?

Tell me about the reading group at the library. Tell me what book you're reading and whether Mrs. Kaplan's grandson is doing okay. Tell me about James and his husband. Tell me what it's like to have a son who knows all of you, even the parts you thought you'd buried.

Tell me it's not too late to dig ourselves up.

Yours in dawn watches and maybe,

**Diane**

P.S. - I looked up fouettés. Thirty-two spinning turns on one leg. Martin, that's not something you forget how to want. That's not something that ever stops being true.

**July 19th**

Dear Diane,

Teach the class. Teach the class, Diane. I'm going to say it three times so you can't pretend you didn't hear me: Teach the class.

You are not crazy. Or if you are, then so am I, because last Thursday I did something I haven't done in forty years.

But first, let me tell you about the reading group, because you asked, and because it connects to everything.

This month we're reading "The Overstory" by Richard Powers. It's about trees and the people who love them, and it's probably too long for a library reading group, but Mrs. Kaplan brought it in and said her daughter recommended it, so we're giving it a try. There are six of us now—Mrs. Kaplan, a college student named Marcus who I think comes for the free coffee, two retired teachers, a woman named Phyllis who never speaks but writes her thoughts down in a notebook, and me.

Last Thursday we were discussing the part where one of the characters learns to really see trees, how they're not just scenery but living systems, and Marcus—who usually just nods and drinks coffee—suddenly said, "That's how I feel about graffiti."

We all looked at him.

And he explained how he's a graffiti artist, how he sees the city as this canvas, how every surface tells him something about texture and light and possibility. How most people just see vandalism, but he sees conversation. Buildings talking to each other.

Mrs. Kaplan said, "Do you ever get arrested?"

And Marcus said, "Sometimes."

And then Phyllis, who never speaks, said—actually said out loud—"I used to steal flowers from the botanical garden. Every Sunday for a year. I'd take one stem and press it in a book. I have forty-seven books full of stolen flowers."

Diane, the room went quiet in that particular way that means something true just happened.

And I don't know what came over me, but I said, "I wanted to be a dancer."

Just like that. Out loud. To six people in the Wallace Community Room of the Duluth Public Library.

Marcus said, "Like ballet?"

"Yes," I said. "Like ballet."

He nodded like this was perfectly normal information. "That's sick," he said, which I've learned from James means good. "Can you still do it?"

And I almost said no. I almost said something about my knees or my age or how long it's been. But then I thought about you waking up at 3 a.m. to watch birds. I thought about thirty-seven cakes. I thought about how you asked if it's too late to dig ourselves up, and I said:

"I did a combination in my kitchen last week."

Mrs. Kaplan started crying. Just tears running down her face while she smiled. She said, "My husband wanted to be an opera singer. He worked at the post office for forty years and never told anyone he could sing. At his funeral, his sister mentioned it in the eulogy, and I realized I'd been married to him for fifty-one years and never heard him really sing. Not once."

We didn't talk about the book for the rest of the session. We just sat there, and one by one, people told the truth about what they'd buried.

You asked about James. He's thirty-three now, and he works as a physical therapist in Seattle. His husband, David, is a high school art teacher. They've been married for two years, and when they visited last Christmas, James told me something I've been carrying around like a stone in my pocket.

He said, "Dad, I always knew you were holding something back. Not from me—from yourself. Like there was a room in you that you kept locked. Mom knew too. We talked about it once."

I asked him if it bothered him, that locked room.

He said, "Yeah. Because I wanted you to know you could open it. That we'd still love you. That we'd love you more, actually, because you'd be all the way real."

I'm crying again writing this. My son wanted me to be all the way real.

So here's what I did: I called the community center. The same one that runs the pen pal program. And I asked if they needed anyone to teach movement classes for seniors. Just gentle stuff—stretching, balance, basic dance elements. The woman on the phone said, "Are you qualified?"

I said, "I've been qualified for forty-five years. I just forgot to mention it."

They're giving me a trial class in August. Third Thursday. I'm terrified, Diane. I'm sixty-two years old and I'm going to stand in front of strangers and show them how to do a tendu. But I'm doing it. I'm unlocking the room.

You have to teach the birdwatching class. You have to. Because somewhere in Albuquerque there's someone like Phyllis who never speaks, and they're going to see a vermilion flycatcher because you showed them how to look, and it's going to crack them open the way your letter cracked me open.

Seven notebooks of observations. Thirty-four species. A pair of goldfinches from nest-building to fledging. Diane, that's not a "bird thing." That's a life's work. That's a PhD in paying attention. That's you becoming an expert in survival and beauty and the things that keep singing.

Rebecca is lucky. Whether she knows it or not, whether she's looking or not, she came from someone who can identify a bird by its call from three blocks away. She came from someone who bakes cakes in the dark and keeps vigil at dawn and knows that the world is full of small, necessary miracles.

And if she never comes looking—Diane, if she never does—it doesn't mean those thirty-seven cakes were wasted. It doesn't mean you loved wrong. It means you loved in the only way you could, steadily and from a distance, the way you might watch a rare bird that lands too far away to photograph. You still saw it. You still know it was real.

But I think she might. I think maybe she's out there getting ready. Because you registered with those databases. You clicked submit. You left a trail, and trails are meant to be followed.

Mourning doves. I'm going to listen for them now. We have them here too, and I've never really paid attention, but now I will. Because you taught me that grief can turn into song if you wake up early enough to hear it.

It's not too late, Diane. I know this because I'm standing in my living room doing pliés while dinner cooks. I know this because Mrs. Kaplan cried in the library. I know this because you wrote to a stranger about birds and daughters and the thirty-seven years you spent surviving, and that stranger wrote back and said: me too, me too, I've been surviving too, and maybe we can do more than that now.

Maybe we can sing.
Maybe we can teach.
Maybe we can spin.

Teach the class. I'll tell you how my class goes if you tell me how yours goes. We'll be scared together. We'll be brave together. We'll be all the way real.

Yours in unlocked rooms,

**Martin**

P.S. - The book Mrs. Kaplan's grandson is doing okay. He got into college. Art school in Minneapolis. She's worried about the loans but proud. She brought cookies to celebrate.

P.P.S. - I looked up vermilion flycatchers. You're right—they look like tiny fires. How have I lived sixty-two years and never known there was such a thing as a bird that red?

**July 31st**

Dear Martin,

I submitted the application to teach the birdwatching class. Two hours after I read your letter, I filled out the form on the community center website, and my hands were shaking so hard I had to retype my email address three times. The class starts September 9th. Saturday mornings, six weeks. They approved me in forty-eight hours.

I'm going to teach people about birds, Martin. At fifty-six, I'm going to stand in front of strangers and show them how to tell a house finch from a purple finch (the house finch looks like someone dipped it in raspberry juice; the purple finch looks like someone had better aim). I'm going to take them to the Rio Grande bosque and point out the yellow-rumped warblers. I'm going to teach them that "birding" is really just permission to pay attention.

I've been writing curriculum every night this week. I can't sleep anyway, so I might as well do something useful with 3 a.m.

But Martin, here's the thing that's been keeping me up even more than the curriculum: I keep thinking about what James said. About the locked room. About wanting you to be all the way real.

I called my sister. Her name is Valerie, and she lives in Phoenix, and we talk maybe once a month, always about nothing—her kids, the weather, did I see that thing on the news. We've been having the same surface conversation for thirty-seven years. She was my roommate when I came back from the hospital. She knew about Rebecca. She held my hair back when I cried so hard I got sick. And then we both agreed never to talk about it again.

I called her last night and I said, "I've been baking a cake every November 14th for thirty-seven years."

Silence. Long enough I thought she'd hung up.

Then: "I know. Mom told me once. She saw you do it when she visited that year you lived in Tucson."

Martin, my mother knew. My mother, who I thought I was protecting by hiding the pregnancy, who I thought would stop being happy if she found out—she knew. She'd known for decades and never said anything because she thought I wanted it to be private.

All these years, I've been protecting people from a truth they already knew.

Valerie said, "Diane, we've all been waiting for you to unlock the door. We just didn't want to break it down."

I can't stop thinking about that. About how much energy I've spent keeping people out of a room they were just standing quietly outside of, waiting to be invited in.

So I'm inviting people in now. Starting with you. Starting with this:

I registered with another database. The big one, the DNA one, where you send in a sample and it matches you with relatives. I did it yesterday. I spit in a tube and sealed it up and sent it off, and now somewhere in a lab my DNA is being processed, turned into data, made searchable.

If Rebecca did the same thing—and the woman at the registry said a lot of adoptees do it, just curious about their ancestry—we'll match. Parent-child relationship. 50% DNA shared. Unmistakable.

I'm terrified, Martin. I'm fifty-six years old and I'm terrified of a piece of mail that might come in six to eight weeks. But I'm more terrified of getting to the end of my life and realizing I was always standing outside my own locked room.

You're teaching movement classes for seniors. You told six people in a library that you wanted to be a dancer. You did pliés while dinner cooked. You're opening the door, and I can't let you do it alone.

Your reading group. Martin, what you've created there—that's not about books. That's about building a place where people can say true things. Mrs. Kaplan crying about her husband who never sang. Phyllis speaking for the first time to confess her beautiful crime of flower-stealing. Marcus and his graffiti. That's a room full of people who've been all the way real together, and you made that happen just by going first.

I think about Clara a lot. How she knew about Miss Olenka, how near the end she gave you permission to grieve what you didn't become. That's what love is—not saving someone from their truth, but sitting beside them while they excavate it. I think she'd be so proud of you right now. Teaching that class. Spinning in your kitchen. Becoming all the way real.

And James. God, James. Wanting you to open the locked room not despite the fact that he loves you but because he loves you. My sister said the same thing last night. She said, "Diane, you've been so busy protecting us from your pain that you never let us love you through it."

Maybe that's what this is—these letters between us. Maybe we're practicing letting someone love us through it. Not despite the buried things, but because of them. Because the buried things are where all the treasure is.

I had a moment yesterday morning. 5:47 a.m., the exact minute when the light starts to change. I was out at the bosque with my binoculars, and I saw a green heron. They're secretive birds, hard to spot, and this one was perfectly still in the shallow water, waiting. Just waiting. And I thought: that's what I've been doing. Waiting in the shallows for thirty-seven years.

And then the heron struck—so fast I almost missed it—and came up with a fish. And I thought: maybe it's time to strike. Maybe it's time to stop waiting and actually reach for what I want.

So I'm reaching. I'm teaching the class. I sent my DNA out into the world. I told my sister about the cakes. I'm telling you about the green heron and what it taught me about patience and when to stop being patient.

What do you want, Martin? Not what you wanted at seventeen—what do you want now, at sixty-two, with your reading group and your son in Seattle and your bad knees and your kitchen that's big enough to dance in?

I want to know because I think we're at the age where we're allowed to want things again. Where we're supposed to. Where the locked room isn't a room anymore but a door standing open, and we're finally brave enough to walk through.

Third Thursday in August. You're going to teach people how to move. I'm going to be thinking about you all day. I'm going to watch the clock here in Albuquerque—which is the same time zone, I just realized—and at whatever time your class is, I'm going to stop what I'm doing and I'm going to watch the birds and think: right now, Martin is unlocking the room. Right now, he's showing people it's never too late.

And then September 9th, you'll do the same for me.

We're doing this, Martin. We're actually doing this.

Yours in striking,

**Diane**

P.S. - There are 900 species of birds in North America. I've seen 287 of them. I want to see 300 before I'm sixty. That gives me about four years and thirteen species. Goals, right? We're allowed to have goals.

P.P.S. - Tell Mrs. Kaplan that art school loans are scary but living without art is scarier. Tell her that her grandson is going to make beautiful things, and that's worth any price. Tell her I said so.

**August 17th**

Dear Diane,

The class happened. I need to tell you while my hands are still shaking.

Eleven people showed up. Eleven. The community center woman said she expected maybe five. There were two men in their seventies, a woman recovering from a stroke, a sixty-eight-year-old former accountant, and seven others whose names I learned and then immediately forgot because I was so nervous I thought I might be sick.

I wore sweatpants and a t-shirt that said "Duluth Public Library Book Sale 2015." I stood at the front of the room—they have mirrors, Diane, the room has mirrors, and I had to look at my sixty-two-year-old self preparing to do something I last did when Carter was president—and I said:

"My name is Martin, and I've been lying about who I am for forty-five years. Today I'm going to stop."

One of the seventy-year-old men started clapping. Just him, this slow steady clapping, and then everyone joined in, and I hadn't even done anything yet except tell the truth.

I taught them about posture first. How to stand like the top of your head is being pulled up by a string. How to feel your feet actually touching the ground. The woman recovering from the stroke started crying—not sad crying, she explained, but because she'd forgotten what it felt like to stand up straight. Her name is Susan, and she said the stroke made her feel like she was apologizing to the world with her body. Standing in first position, she said, felt like taking up space again.

We did tendus. Pliés. Port de bras—just the arms, slow and simple. I put on Tchaikovsky, the same recording Clara used to play, and I showed them how to move like water, like time, like something that doesn't apologize for existing.

The former accountant—his name is Robert—said, "Is it supposed to feel like crying?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes, it is."

Diane, I taught for ninety minutes and it felt like both nine seconds and nine years. When it was over, three people asked if there would be more classes. Susan asked if I did private lessons. Robert said he hadn't felt his body in twenty years of sitting at a desk and now he couldn't stop feeling it.

And at 10:47 a.m.—I checked the clock because I knew you were watching birds and thinking of me—I did a relevé in front of eleven strangers, rose up on the balls of my feet, arms in fifth position, and I felt seventeen again. Except better. Because at seventeen I was hiding. At sixty-two, in a community center in Duluth with mirrors showing every wrinkle and every year, I was completely visible.

That's what I want, Diane. You asked me what I want now. I want to be visible. I want to stop apologizing for taking up space. I want to teach this class every week until my knees give out entirely, and even then I'll teach people how to move their arms, their heads, how to stand like they matter.

I want to visit James in Seattle and go to the ballet with him and David and not sit in the back row. I want to sit close enough to see the dancers sweat.

I want to write letters to you for the rest of my life.

I want to be there when you teach your first birdwatching class, even though I can't be, so I'm going to do what you did: September 9th, whatever time your class is, I'm going to go outside and look for mourning doves, and I'm going to think about you showing strangers how to see vermilion flycatchers, and I'm going to be so proud I might burst.

Your mother knew about the cakes. Your sister's been waiting outside the locked room. Diane, everyone has been waiting for you to let yourself be loved. And now you're doing it—teaching the class, sending your DNA out into the world, telling the truth about Rebecca.

The DNA test. Jesus, Diane. That's not just opening a door. That's taking down the entire wall.

I need to tell you something: I think Rebecca is going to find you. I don't mean I hope or I wish—I mean I think. Because the kind of person who bakes thirty-seven cakes in the dark is the kind of person who sends a signal strong enough to reach across decades. Because you didn't just give her life—you gave her your attention to detail, your ability to observe, your capacity to love something faithfully even when it can't love you back. That's genetic too, in a way. That's inheritance.

And when she finds you—not if, when—she's going to ask you what you've been doing for thirty-seven years. And you're going to tell her about the birds. About waking up at 3 a.m. to watch the world survive. About 287 species and counting. About how you became an expert in noticing what stays, what goes, what comes back in the spring.

You're going to tell her you never stopped being her mother, you just did it from a distance, the way you might document a rare bird that can't be approached. With reverence. With attention. With love that doesn't require permission.

Green herons. I looked them up. They fish with bait, did you know that? They drop insects on the water to lure fish closer. They're tool-users. Strategists. Patient until the exact right moment, and then—strike.

That's you. You've been patient for thirty-seven years, and now you're striking. Teaching. Testing. Telling. Taking down walls. I'm in awe of you.

I told Mrs. Kaplan what you said about her grandson. About art school loans and living without art. She wrote it down in the margin of her book. She said, "Tell your pen pal I said thank you. Tell her my grandson is going to make me proud." I told her he already has, just by being brave enough to want something. She cried again. We're all crying a lot lately in the reading group. It's that kind of book. It's that kind of time.

Phyllis brought us all pressed flowers. One for each person. Mine is a violet, and it's pressed between pages 247 and 248 of my copy of "The Overstory," and I'm never moving it. It's going to stay there forever, this flower she stole from the botanical garden because beauty was calling to her and she answered.

That's what we're doing, isn't it? We're all answering. Finally. After decades of pretending we don't hear the call.

The community center wants me to teach an ongoing class. Every Thursday morning. I said yes. I said yes, Diane, and then I went home and called James and told him everything. About Miss Olenka, about the lie I told at seventeen, about Clara knowing, about the letters from you, about teaching eleven people how to do a tendu.

He said, "Dad, I'm buying a plane ticket. I'm coming for Thanksgiving. I want to take your class."

My son wants to take my dance class. My thirty-three-year-old son who is a physical therapist and knows exactly how bodies work wants to stand in a room with a bunch of seniors and learn ballet from his father.

I'm crying again. I've cried more in the last two months than I did in the three years after Clara died. But these tears feel different. They feel like water that's been frozen for decades finally thawing. They feel like spring.

287 species. Diane, that's remarkable. You're going to hit 300. I know you are. And when you do, I want you to tell me about number 300. I want to know what bird it is, where you saw it, what the light was doing, everything.

But here's what I really want to know: what do you want? You asked me, and I answered, but you haven't told me yet. Not teaching the class—that's what you're doing. Not finding Rebecca—that's what you're hoping for. What do you want?

What does Diane Soto want that has nothing to do with anyone else? What does she want just for herself, just because she's alive and fifty-six and has already survived the unsurvivable?

Tell me. I want to know. I want to know everything.

September 9th. I'm setting three alarms. I'm going to be watching the sky at whatever time your class starts. I'm going to be right there with you, invisible but present, the way you were with me at 10:47 a.m. on August 15th when I did that relevé and felt completely seen.

We're doing it, Diane. We're actually doing it.

Yours in visibility,

**Martin**

P.S. - The violet Phyllis gave me is perfect. Purple-blue and delicate and absolutely stolen. I've never loved a flower more.

P.P.S. - James asked if you're single. I told him that's none of his business and also you're my pen pal, not a dating prospect. He said, "Dad, you write to her more than you wrote to Mom when you were deployed." I wasn't deployed—I've never been deployed—but I understood what he meant. These letters are a kind of deployment. Into enemy territory. The enemy being all the years we spent lying to ourselves.

P.P.P.S. - Eleven people, Diane. Eleven people showed up to learn ballet from a sixty-two-year-old librarian who can barely do a relevé. If eleven people showed up for me, imagine how many are going to show up for you.

**September 4th**

Dear Martin,

Eleven people. You taught eleven people how to stand up straight and stop apologizing with their bodies. You did a relevé at 10:47 a.m. and felt completely seen. Your son is flying home for Thanksgiving to take your class.

Martin, I've read your letter maybe thirty times. I keep it folded in my field guide, the Peterson's, right in the flycatcher section. So now every time I look up a bird, there you are, teaching Susan how to take up space again.

My class is in five days. September 9th, 8 a.m. Mountain Time. I'm terrified. I've rewritten my curriculum four times. I've walked the route through the bosque twice to make sure I know exactly where the good birding spots are. I've been having dreams where I'm standing in front of people and no birds show up, just empty sky, and everyone looks at me like I'm a liar.

But that's not what you asked me. You asked me what I want.

I've been sitting with that question for six days. I started to write this letter three times and stopped because I kept trying to answer with something noble. Something about helping others find peace through birds, or contributing to citizen science, or leaving the world better than I found it. All true things. But not the true thing.

Here's what I want, Martin:

I want to be loud.

I've been quiet for thirty-seven years. Quiet in my marriage, quiet at work, quiet about Rebecca, quiet about the birds, quiet about everything that mattered. I've trained myself to be efficient and unobtrusive, to take up no more space than absolutely necessary, to transcribe other people's words and never speak my own.

But I want to be loud now. I want to teach that birdwatching class and say with full volume: these birds matter, and I matter for knowing them, and you should care about this because I care about this. I want to stop apologizing for my expertise. I want to stop saying "it's just my bird thing" and start saying "I'm an ornithologist who never bothered to make it official."

I want to go back to school. There. I said it. I'm fifty-six years old and I want to get a master's degree in ornithology. There's a program at UNM—the same university where I had Rebecca, where I walked around pregnant and pretending—and they accept "non-traditional students," which is code for people like me who took a thirty-seven-year detour through grief.

I want to stop typing other people's medical crises and start writing my own observations. I want to publish papers. I want my name on research. I want someone to cite me someday: "Soto, D. (2025). Migration Patterns of Vermilion Flycatchers in Urban Albuquerque Habitats." I want my contribution to be searchable, permanent, real.

I want to travel. I've never left the Southwest, did you know that? I've lived in New Mexico and Arizona my entire life. But the Yucatan Peninsula has flamingos. Costa Rica has resplendent quetzals—birds so beautiful they look like they were invented by someone who'd never seen a bird before and had to work from pure imagination. Alaska has puffins. Martin, I want to see a puffin. I want to see 300 species and then 400 and then 500.

I want to stop baking cakes in the dark.

I don't mean I want to stop remembering Rebecca—I'll remember her until I stop breathing. But I want to bake the cake in daylight. With my sister there. Maybe with Rebecca there, if she finds me. I want to stop treating my love for her like a secret ritual and start treating it like what it is: a mother's love that never had anywhere to go but didn't die from the going.

And Martin—and this is the want that scares me most—I want to be someone's friend. Not pen pal, though I love being your pen pal. But friend. The kind who calls on Tuesday for no reason. The kind who knows what you're afraid of and brings you soup when you're sick and sits with you while you're not okay. I've been so isolated for so long. My ex-husband, my coworkers, even my sister—I've kept everyone at transcriptionist distance. Professional. Efficient. Closed.

But you asked me what James said and I told you. You told me about Miss Olenka and I didn't flinch. We've been excavating ourselves together, and I don't want to stop. I don't want these letters to end when the pen pal program ends, or when we've both successfully unlocked our rooms, or when Rebecca finds me, or when we run out of buried things to dig up.

I want you in my life, Martin. However that looks. However long that lasts. You're the first person in thirty-seven years who I've let see me cry, even if it's through paper and ink and postal carriers. You're the first person who made me feel like being loud wasn't the same as being too much.

The DNA test results came back yesterday. No matches yet. But the database updates constantly, they said. People register every day. So I'm waiting, and for the first time, the waiting doesn't feel like drowning. It feels like the green heron in the shallows. Patient. Ready. And when the moment comes—when she finds me or I find her—I'll strike.

Your son asked if I'm single. Martin, I'm laughing. I'm sitting at my kitchen table at 11 p.m. laughing until I'm crying because your son is trying to set you up with your pen pal. Tell him: yes, I'm single. I've been single for eight years. And no, I'm not looking for romance—I'm fifty-six and done with all that. But tell him also: his father writes the kind of letters that make a person feel less alone in the universe, and that's rarer than any resplendent quetzal.

Tell him his father is brave. Tell him you're teaching people how to stand up straight and that's the most important kind of physical therapy there is.

Five days until my class. I've got twelve people registered. Twelve, Martin. Most of them are retirees, but there's one college student (an environmental science major), and one woman who wrote in the comments section: "I just got divorced and need something beautiful to look at besides my lawyer's bills."

I'm bringing binoculars for people who don't have them. I'm printing out field guide pages. I'm planning a route that goes past the cottonwoods where I saw the vermilion flycatcher, past the pond where the green heron hunts, past the willow thicket where the yellow warblers nest.

And at 8 a.m. Mountain Time on September 9th, I'm going to stand in front of twelve strangers and say: "My name is Diane Soto, and I've been watching birds for thirty-seven years. Today I'm going to teach you how to see what I see."

No apologies. No "just my bird thing." Just the truth, spoken at full volume.

You'll be watching mourning doves. I'll know you're out there, in Duluth, 1,200 miles away, looking up. And I'll be here, finally visible, finally loud, finally teaching people that paying attention is a form of love.

We're doing it, Martin. God, we're actually doing it.

The violet Phyllis gave you—I love that you love it. I love that it's stolen and pressed and permanent. I love that your reading group has become this space where people bring each other evidence of their secret selves. That's what these letters are too, isn't it? Evidence. Proof that we existed all along, even when we were hiding.

Thank you for asking what I want. Thank you for making it safe to answer loudly.

Yours in volume,

**Diane**

P.S. - James is coming home for Thanksgiving. Your son is flying across the country to take your ballet class. Martin, do you understand what that means? It means you raised someone who knows that the locked rooms are where love lives. It means you were a good father even when you thought you were hiding. The love came through anyway.

P.P.S. - 8 a.m. Mountain Time is 9 a.m. your time. So when you're looking for mourning doves, I'll be teaching my first student how to use binoculars. We'll be in this together, like we have been since June 3rd when you told me about wanting to dance.

P.P.P.S. - A master's degree in ornithology. I can't believe I wrote that out loud. I can't believe I want it this much. What have you done to me, Martin Schaefer? You've made me want things again. You've made me loud.

**September 12th**

Dear Diane,

At 9 a.m. on September 9th, I walked to the park by the lake. There's a bench there where Clara and I used to sit, back when sitting together and saying nothing felt like enough. I brought coffee in a thermos and my field guide—the same Peterson's you have, because I went to the library and checked it out after your first letter about birds.

And I waited for mourning doves.

They came at 9:14 a.m. Three of them, walking on the grass like little wind-up toys, heads bobbing. And then one of them called—that sound you described, whooo-OO-oo-oo, loneliness made into music—and Diane, I understood. I understood why you've been waking up at 3 a.m. for thirty-seven years. Because that sound is the sound of everything we can't say out loud, but the bird says it anyway. The bird is never quiet about grief.

I sat there until 10:30, and I saw five more species. I have no idea what most of them were—little brown jobs, as I've learned birders call them—but I wrote them down. I sketched their shapes. I paid attention the way you taught me to pay attention. And the whole time I was thinking: right now, Diane is being loud. Right now, she's standing in front of twelve people and not apologizing. Right now, she's teaching them to see.

How did it go? Tell me everything. Tell me if the birds showed up. Tell me what the divorced woman said. Tell me if you felt like an ornithologist who never bothered to make it official, because Diane, that's what you are. That's what you've always been.

Get the degree. I'm not asking. I'm telling you: get the degree. You're fifty-six, which means you could have your master's by fifty-eight, and then what? Forty more years of being Dr. Diane Soto, publishing papers, traveling to see quetzals, being cited by graduate students who don't know they're standing on the shoulders of someone who learned to see birds because she needed something to survive for.

I want to read your papers. I want to see your name with credentials after it. I want you to stop transcribing other people's pain and start writing your own observations in the language of science, which is just another way of being precise about beauty.

And yes. Yes to being friends. Not pen pals—though we started there, and I'm grateful we did. But friends. The kind who call on Tuesday. The kind who know what the other person is afraid of. Diane, I'm afraid all the time. I'm afraid my knees will give out before I finish teaching what I need to teach. I'm afraid James will take my class and realize his father is just an old man playing dress-up in someone else's dream. I'm afraid I wasted Clara's love by not being brave enough while she was alive to see it.

But I'm less afraid when I write to you. I'm less afraid knowing that 1,200 miles away, someone else is also being scared and brave at the same time. Someone else is also teaching at an age when we're supposed to have everything figured out. Someone else is also waiting for DNA results and watching birds and wanting things that feel too big to want.

So yes. Friends. Forever friends, if you'll have me.

Here's what you did to me, Diane Soto: you made me believe that sixty-two isn't the end of the story. It's just the chapter where the protagonist finally figures out what the book is about.

My ongoing Thursday class had fifteen people this week. Fifteen. They had to bring in extra chairs. And Robert—the former accountant who asked if it's supposed to feel like crying—brought his wife. She's a tiny woman named Linda, maybe five feet tall, and she told me she used to do ballet when she was young. Actually trained. Actually was good. And then she got married and had four kids and somewhere in there, she stopped.

"I thought my body was done," she said after class. "I thought it was just for carrying groceries and getting through the day. But when you said to stand like we matter—" She couldn't finish. She just cried, and Robert held her hand, and I thought: this is what I'm teaching. Not ballet. Permission to matter.

That's what you're teaching too. Not birdwatching. Permission to pay attention. Permission to care about small, beautiful things. Permission to wake up at dawn and say yes, this matters, I matter for seeing this.

Be loud, Diane. Be so loud they hear you in the Yucatan. Be so loud that when Rebecca finds you—and she will, I'm more certain every day—she'll understand immediately that she came from someone who refused to whisper about the things she loved.

You said you want to bake the cake in daylight. With your sister there. Maybe with Rebecca. Diane, that image—I can't stop thinking about it. Thirty-seven years of secret ceremonies becoming one public celebration. Thirty-seven years of vigil becoming a party. That's not just opening a door. That's throwing open every window in the house and letting the light pour in.

When you get into the master's program—not if, when—I'm flying to Albuquerque. I'm bringing you flowers. Not stolen ones like Phyllis, but bought-from-a-florist, carried-on-an-airplane, celebration flowers. And we're going birding. You're taking me to see that vermilion flycatcher, and I'm going to understand finally what you mean about tiny fires in trees.

And maybe—if you want—maybe I'll show you a tendu. Just one. Just so you can see what it looks like when someone who buried their truth for forty-five years finally digs it up and polishes it off and says: here. Here is what I am.

James called me yesterday. He's already bought his plane ticket for Thanksgiving. November 26th through December 1st. He said David might come too, if that's okay. I said of course it's okay. I said I want to meet the person who married my son. I said I'm teaching ballet now, did I mention that? He laughed. He said, "Dad, you've mentioned it approximately forty-seven times."

But then he said something that made me cry. He said: "I'm proud of you. I know Mom would be proud of you too."

Clara would be proud. She'd be proud I'm teaching. She'd be proud I told the truth. She'd be proud I found you, this person 1,200 miles away who writes letters at 11 p.m. and makes me laugh about being set up by my own son.

The database will update. Rebecca will register her DNA, or she already has and the results are processing, or she did it years ago and the match is coming. I believe this the way I believe the sun will rise. Because you're her mother, and mothers send out signals, and daughters—even ones who don't know they're looking—receive them.

287 species. You're thirteen away from 300. What are you hoping number 300 will be? Do you have a dream bird? Something you've been waiting for? Tell me, and when you see it, I want you to call me. Not write—call. I want to hear your voice saying: Martin, I saw it. I saw number 300. I'm going to give you my phone number at the bottom of this letter, and you're going to call me when it happens, and I'm going to be the first person you tell.

Because that's what friends do. They witness each other's number 300. They show up for the moments that matter.

You asked what I've done to you. You said I made you want things again, made you loud. But Diane, you did that yourself. I just held up a mirror. I just said: look, here's who you've always been. Here's the ornithologist, the mother, the loud woman who knows 287 species and isn't finished counting.

All I did was see you. And you saw me back. And maybe that's all anyone needs—one person who looks at the locked room and says: I'll wait right here while you open it. I'll be the first one inside. I'll tell you it's beautiful.

Your room is beautiful, Diane. Your birds and your cakes and your seven notebooks and your 3 a.m. vigils and your thirty-seven years of faithful, private love. It's all beautiful. And now it's not private anymore. Now it's loud.

Stay loud. I'm listening.

Yours in witnessing,

**Martin**

P.S. - My phone number: (218) 555-0147. Call me when you see number 300. Call me when you hear from the master's program. Call me when Rebecca finds you. Call me on Tuesday for no reason. I mean it.

P.P.S. - I saw a bald eagle today. Just circling over the lake, huge and impossible. I stood there like a tourist in my own city, staring. Now I understand why you keep seven notebooks. How else do you hold onto something that magnificent?

P.P.P.S. - Susan from my class asked if you give online birdwatching lessons. I told her you're about to start a master's program and will probably be too busy, but that you're extraordinary at birds and she should know that. She said, "Tell her I said congratulations." So: Susan says congratulations. We all do. Everyone in the Thursday morning dance class is cheering for the woman in Albuquerque who taught their teacher how to pay attention.

**September 20th**

Dear Martin,

I'm holding your letter with your phone number on it, and I've picked up my phone four times to call you, and four times I've put it back down. Not because I don't want to—I do, desperately—but because I'm fifty-six years old and I've forgotten how to just call someone. How to say "hello, it's me" and trust that the person on the other end wants to hear your voice.

But I'm going to. I'm going to call you. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe when I see bird 300. Maybe just on a Tuesday for no reason, like you said. I'm adding your number to my phone right now. Martin Schaefer, Duluth. The man who taught me how to be loud.

The class, Martin. Oh god, the class.

All twelve people showed up. The environmental science major's name is Casey—they/them pronouns, bright green backpack covered in bird pins. The divorced woman is named Patricia, and she wore hiking boots that looked like they'd never seen a trail and brought a notebook with "NEW BEGINNINGS" embossed on the cover in gold letters.

We met at the bosque at 8 a.m., and I stood there with my binoculars around my neck and my seven field guides in my bag (I couldn't choose just one), and I said exactly what I told you I would say: "My name is Diane Soto, and I've been watching birds for thirty-seven years. Today I'm going to teach you how to see what I see."

And then I took them to see the vermilion flycatcher.

Martin, he was there. Like he knew. Like he'd been waiting. Perched on the same cottonwood branch where I first saw him last month, so red he looked like someone had set a tiny fire in the branches. I didn't say anything at first—I just raised my binoculars and pointed, and twelve people went silent, and we all looked at this impossible bird together.

Patricia started crying. She said, "I thought everything beautiful was behind me."

Casey said, "Holy shit"—then apologized for swearing, then took seventeen photographs.

A retired postal worker named Gene said, "My wife used to say I never paid attention to anything. She was right. But I'm paying attention now."

We saw fourteen species that morning. Fourteen. I taught them the difference between a house finch and a purple finch (Gene said, "One got drunk on raspberry wine, the other took a bath in it"—he's got the gift). I showed them how to listen for the yellow warbler's call: sweet-sweet-sweet-I'm-so-sweet. I taught them that birding is really just learning to be still and let the world show you what it wants you to see.

And at the end, Patricia asked if we could do this every week, not just for six weeks. She said, "I need this. I need something to get up for on Saturday mornings that isn't just surviving."

Martin, I'm teaching an ongoing class now. Every Saturday. They're calling it "Birding with Diane." Not "Introduction to Birdwatching" or "Basic Ornithology"—Birding with Diane. Like I'm the thing that matters, not just the information I'm transferring.

I'm an ornithologist. I'm actually, officially, out-loud an ornithologist.

And then I did something even scarier: I applied to the master's program at UNM. I submitted the application yesterday. It's due October 15th, but I couldn't wait anymore. I wrote my personal statement about the birds, about the thirty-seven years, about how I became an expert by accident because I needed something to survive for. I didn't mention Rebecca—some truths still feel too private for graduate school applications—but I mentioned transformation. I mentioned paying attention as a form of love.

The environmental science professor who'd be my advisor called me this morning. She said my application was "compelling." She asked if I could come in for an interview next week. Martin, they're interviewing me. At fifty-six, with no formal ornithology background except seven notebooks and 287 species and three decades of 3 a.m. vigils, they're interviewing me.

I said yes. Obviously I said yes. The interview is September 27th at 2 p.m.

I'm terrified. I'm fifty-six years old and I'm terrified of sitting in an office at the university where I had Rebecca and pretending I'm qualified to study birds at a graduate level. But I'm also—Martin, I'm also so excited I can barely sleep. Not the bad 3 a.m. insomnia. The good kind. The kind where you're awake because your brain is too full of possibilities to shut down.

You said you'd fly here when I get in. Martin, you can't just say things like that. You can't just offer to get on a plane and bring me flowers and go birding with me, because then I start imagining it, and once I start imagining it, I want it too much.

But okay. Yes. If I get in—when I get in, because I'm practicing your certainty—you fly here. You bring me flowers. We go see the vermilion flycatcher together. And I'll teach you the difference between a raven and a crow (size, call, tail shape in flight—I'll make you an expert). And maybe you'll show me a tendu, and I'll finally understand what it looks like when someone's body speaks the truth their mouth couldn't.

James and David are coming for Thanksgiving. You're going to have both of them in your Thursday class. Martin, you're building something extraordinary. Fifteen people learning to stand like they matter. Linda remembering she's not just for carrying groceries. Susan taking up space again after her stroke. That's not teaching ballet. That's teaching resurrection.

Tell Susan I don't do online lessons yet, but maybe I will. Tell her when I finish my master's I'll think about it. Tell her thank you for the congratulations, and tell her that learning to stand up straight is the same as learning to identify birds—it's all about paying attention to what's been there all along, waiting to be seen.

You asked about my dream bird for number 300. 

I want it to be a painted bunting. They don't live here—they're mostly southeastern birds, though sometimes they show up in southern New Mexico during migration. They're the most colorful bird in North America. Blue head, green back, red chest. They look like someone who'd never seen a bird before had to invent one using only the brightest crayons.

When I was twenty-one—two years after Rebecca—I saw a painted bunting in a field guide and I thought: something that beautiful can't be real. It felt like a trick. Like someone made it up to make the rest of us feel bad about being plain.

But they're real. They exist. And if I could see one—if number 300 could be a painted bunting—it would feel like the universe saying: Diane, beautiful things do exist. Even the ones that seem impossible. Even the ones you think are too bright to be true.

So I'm waiting. I'm at 287, and I need thirteen more, and I'm letting number 300 find me whenever it's ready. Maybe this year. Maybe next. Maybe when I'm fifty-seven with a master's degree and a daughter who found me and a friend in Duluth who taught me how to stand up straight even from 1,200 miles away.

The DNA database still shows no matches. I check it every morning. Every morning, no match. And every morning, I tell myself the same thing you told me: it doesn't mean she's not looking. It means she hasn't found me yet. The yet is the important part.

I'm putting your phone number in my favorites. Right there at the top of the list, above my sister, above my therapist, above the pizza place I order from when I'm too tired to cook. Martin Schaefer, Duluth. The man who sees mourning doves at 9:14 a.m. and thinks of me.

I'm going to call you. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon. When I need to hear another human voice say my name out loud. When I get the interview results. When I see bird 300. When it's Tuesday and I'm scared and I need someone who knows what it's like to teach something you've kept hidden for decades.

You held up a mirror, you said. But Martin, you did more than that. You showed me that the mirror wasn't showing a ghost. It was showing someone real. Someone who never stopped existing, even when she was trying to.

Thank you for the bald eagle story. Thank you for understanding about the notebooks. Thank you for telling Susan about me, for sitting on Clara's bench and waiting for mourning doves, for being less afraid when you write to me.

I'm less afraid too. I'm fifty-six years old, and I'm less afraid than I've been since I was nineteen.

That's what you did to me, Martin Schaefer. You made me less afraid.

Stay brave. I'm watching.

Yours in favorites lists,

**Diane**

P.S. - I'm teaching twelve people to bird. You're teaching fifteen people to dance. Together we're teaching twenty-seven people that it's never too late to pay attention to beauty. That's not nothing. That's everything.

P.P.S. - A painted bunting. That's my dream. That's number 300. If I see one, you'll be the first call I make. I promise.

P.P.P.S. - I just realized: we've been writing to each other for almost four months. June 3rd to September 20th. In four months, we've both become different people. Or maybe the same people we always were, just louder. Either way, thank you. For all of it. For seeing me. For letting me see you back.

**October 2nd**

Dear Diane,

I'm writing this at 11:30 p.m., and I just got off the phone with James, and I need to tell you something before I lose my nerve.

First: how did the interview go? It's been five days since September 27th, and I've been checking my mailbox like a lunatic, waiting for your letter. If you haven't heard back yet, they're fools. If you have heard back and it's good news, I'm already looking at plane tickets. If it's bad news—which it won't be, but if—then they're still fools, and you apply again, and again, until someone recognizes that seven notebooks of observations is worth more than any undergraduate transcript.

But that's not what I need to tell you.

What I need to tell you is this: call me. Please. Not when you see bird 300, not when you get news from the program, not on some future Tuesday when you're scared. Call me now. Tonight, if you're reading this tonight. Tomorrow if you're reading this tomorrow.

I know you're fifty-six and you've forgotten how to just call someone. I'm sixty-two and I've forgotten too. After Clara died, the phone felt like this dead thing on the wall—something that only rang with bad news or telemarketers. But then James called me tonight, and we talked for ninety minutes about nothing and everything, and when I hung up I realized: I miss your voice.

I don't know your voice, Diane. I've been reading your words for four months, and I can hear them in some imaginary voice I've invented, but I don't actually know how you sound when you say "vermilion flycatcher" or "I'm terrified" or "Martin, I saw it."

So call me. Please. Even if it's just to say hello. Even if we only talk for five minutes before the awkwardness gets too big and we have to hang up and write letters about how weird it was to hear each other's voices. I don't care. I want to know how you sound when you're real.

Here's what James told me tonight: David proposed. Actually, James proposed to David—again—even though they're already married. He did it at dinner, in a restaurant, got down on one knee in front of everyone and said, "I want to marry you again. Every year. Forever."

David said yes. Obviously David said yes.

And James said, "Dad, I learned that from you. From watching you with Mom. The way you chose her every single day, even after thirty-eight years. Even when things were hard. Even at the end. You taught me that love isn't something you do once—it's something you keep doing."

I started crying on the phone. I told him I didn't know he'd been watching. I told him I thought I'd hidden all my locked rooms so well that he only saw the man I was pretending to be.

He said, "Dad, we always see more than you think we do."

That's what you've been teaching me, Diane. That people see more than I think they do. That hiding doesn't protect anyone—it just makes everyone lonelier. That being seen is scary but being invisible is worse.

Fourteen species in one morning. Patricia crying because she thought beautiful things were behind her. Gene learning to pay attention. Casey taking seventeen photographs of a bird so red it looks like fire. Diane, you didn't just teach them birdwatching. You taught them the same thing I'm teaching in that community center—that we're not done. That at fifty-six and sixty-two and seventy-three, we're not finished becoming.

"Birding with Diane." They named it after you. Because you're not just transferring information—you're showing people how to be alive in a different way. That's not teaching. That's ministry.

And now you're going to get your master's degree (I'm not saying if, I'm saying when), and you're going to publish papers, and someday some graduate student is going to read "Soto, D." and never know they're reading the words of someone who learned to see birds because she needed to survive. They'll never know about the cakes or the DNA tests or the 3 a.m. walks. They'll just know the science.

But I'll know. I'll know the whole story.

The painted bunting. Diane, when you described it—blue head, green back, red chest, made up by someone who'd never seen a bird before and only had the brightest crayons—I looked it up. You're right. It looks impossible. It looks like something a child would draw and an adult would say, "Birds aren't really that colorful, honey."

But they are. They're that colorful. The impossible beautiful things are real.

When you see it—your number 300—I want to be the first call. But also, I want you to call me before that. I want you to call me this week. I want to hear you practice being brave in real-time, not just on paper where you have time to edit your courage.

Here's my confession: I almost called you three times this week. Three times I picked up the phone and dialed the first six digits of your number and then hung up. Because what if your voice doesn't match the person I've been imagining? What if we run out of things to say? What if the magic only works on paper, and speaking out loud breaks whatever spell we've been casting in these letters?

But then I remembered: we're not magic. We're just two people who told the truth at the same time and discovered that the truth sounds better in harmony than it does alone.

So let's harmonize. Let's be scared on the phone instead of just on paper. Let's hear each other say hello and realize that four months of letters have built something real enough to survive the sound of our actual voices.

My class had seventeen people this week. Seventeen. They had to move us to a bigger room. And Linda—Robert's wife who used to dance—asked if she could demonstrate something. Just a simple combination, nothing fancy. And Diane, she did a series of movements that were so beautiful I had to look away for a second because it hurt to see what the body remembers, even after fifty years of carrying groceries.

When she finished, everyone applauded. Susan was crying again (Susan cries at everything, I've learned—it's her new hobby since the stroke). And Linda said, "I thought I was too old. I thought my body was just for getting through the day. But it still knows how to do this. It still remembers."

That's what we're teaching them, isn't it? That the body remembers. That nothing is ever really lost. That the things we buried are just sleeping, waiting for someone to give them permission to wake up.

Your interview was September 27th. It's October 2nd now. Five days. Have you heard anything? Are you checking your email every ten minutes like I check my mailbox for your letters? Tell me everything. Tell me what you wore, what they asked, whether the campus looked the same as it did thirty-seven years ago when you walked around pregnant and pretending.

Tell me if going back to that place felt like haunting or like reclaiming.

The DNA database still shows no matches, you said. Every morning you check. Every morning, not yet. But Diane, the yet is everything. The yet means you're still leaving the door open. Still believing in the painted bunting. Still trusting that impossible beautiful things are real.

I believe Rebecca is going to find you. I believe it the way I believe the sun will rise, the way I believe in mourning doves at 9:14 a.m., the way I believe that you're going to call me and your voice is going to sound exactly right.

And when she does find you—when, not if—you're going to tell her about the birds. You're going to take her to the bosque at dawn and show her the vermilion flycatcher. You're going to explain that you learned to see because you needed something to love that couldn't leave you. And she's going to understand. Or she won't understand yet, but she will eventually, because understanding takes time and you've taught me that patience is just another word for love that knows how to wait.

I'm putting this letter in the mail tomorrow morning, but I'm also writing my phone number again at the bottom, bigger this time, in case you lost the last one or need to see it again to believe I mean it:

**(218) 555-0147**

Call me, Diane. Even if you're terrified. Especially if you're terrified. Let me hear you say "hello" and "I saw fourteen species" and "I'm less afraid." Let me hear the voice that's been writing these letters. Let me know you're real and not just something I invented because I was lonely.

Four months. June to October. We've been excavating ourselves together, and we've found birds and ballet and thirty-seven cakes and locked rooms and painted buntings and second chances. We've found each other.

Don't let that only live on paper. Let it live in sound. Let it live in "hello, it's me" and "I was just thinking about you" and "guess what happened today."

I'm waiting by the phone. Literally. It's on the table next to my chair, and I'm going to keep it close, and when it rings I'm going to hope it's you.

Stay loud. Stay brave. Stay real.

Yours in waiting,

**Martin**

P.S. - James and David are getting married again. Every year, forever. I didn't know that was something you could do, but apparently love is something you can choose over and over. I should have known that. I did that with Clara for thirty-eight years. But it's different when your son names it out loud. When he says: I learned this from you.

P.P.S. - If you're reading this and you're still too scared to call, then write me back and tell me why. Tell me what makes picking up the phone harder than baring your soul on paper. Because I want to understand. I want to know everything about how you're brave and how you're scared and how those two things exist in the same person at the same time.

P.P.P.S. - A painted bunting. Blue, green, red. Impossible and real. That's you, Diane. That's exactly you.