love letter from the girl who came before me

chapter one

autumn

It was mid-autumn when I first heard her name. It rolled off his lips like every dirty confession does: with a sense of anger, a tone of guilt and laced with inevitable regret. However, it would take me many months to discover the true nature of this secret. Jonah was always straight forward. He was studying law with the hopes of becoming a lawyer. We met at a trial him as an intern for the defendant and me as a journalist covering what was set to be the trial of the century. Jonah sat there stony faced, taking notes and re-shuffling pages as the Lawyers battled out their case. I can never remember exactly what they were fighting for. I do, however, remember seeing Jonah highlight something violently and slip it to his mentor. They continued on to win the case. I remember approaching Jonah afterwards for an interview. He was shy and polite and at the end of the interview asked timidly for my number which I obligingly gave. From there our relationship bloomed we dated for four months until his graduation from Law school. Jonah and I decided to rent an apartment in the Lower East Side of New York, towards the Financial district. It's a glorious place, and it should be considering our paycheques.  The perfect place for the perfect couple on the rise in both the social scene and business world. We'd been dating for almost three years before I heard her name. It was ushered under his breath as we sat at brunch one morning.

'Brooklyn.'

At first I thought he was muttering about the place but then I saw that his gaze was fixated on a girl across the room with almost white blonde hair. She turned to face us and he released the breath that he was holding. It must not have been her. I felt a pressure lift off my chest. I thought I knew about all the girlfriend he's had before, I had never heard of a Brooklyn. I stared at him expectantly from across the table.

'Well?'I asked as he took another sip of his coffee.

'Well what?' He replies avoiding my gaze.

'What was all that?' I question motioning between him and the girl.

'I thought it was a girl I used to know,' He says simply. I lean back in my chair crossing my arms over my chest.

'A girlfriend?'I ask accusingly.

'Yes.' He states honestly. Looking me straight in the eye.

'Brooklyn was the girl that came before you,' he says, 'but that was then and this is now. There is really no point in dwelling on the past.'I stared at him, it was so poetic his description of a supposedly insignificant girl.

'Then why did you react when you saw someone who looked like her?' I snap.

'It's doesn't matter Adeline, she is gone. Me and her is over.' He says. The tone of finality in his voice makes me drop the subject, for now, as my curiosity grows.

It had been a week with her name inside my brain before I decided that I needed answers. So whilst Jonah was away at a crime scene I set out with my goal. Find out anything about Brooklyn that I could. I went through boxes and boxes of Jonah's old stuff until I reached a large box labelled 'Before'. With anticipation rippling through my bones I open the lid to see stacks of letters and journals and photo albums. I pick out a loose photo and swipe the layer of dust off of it to reveal the image underneath. A girl with dyed white blonde hair holding up a polaroid camera almost as if she was taking a picture of the person who was photographing her. I turned the photo over to see Jonah's handwriting on the back "Brooklyn the photographer July 4th 2010". I has found her. I pull out the stacks of letters placing them in chronological order. Half of them were in Jonah's writing and half in someone else's, whom I assumed to be Brooklyn. I opened the first and began to read.

My dearest Jonah,

I glare at the page upon reading how this woman addresses him as if it were the fifties or sixties or even back to the fabulous swing and jazz of the twenties. A blush rose to my cheeks as I realized that I must have been green with envy over a simple greeting.