The Waiting Game

The Eleventh Letter

“This is completely mad,” Devon muttered, his hands clamped so tightly on the steering wheel that his knuckles were white. “I can’t believe you even talked me into this. This is totally nuts.”

“It’s not that strange, if you think about it,” I tried to reason with him, but he wasn’t hearing anything of it. I had been trying to talk to him for the last half an hour since I showed up at his door with the new letter in my hand, telling him that I needed his help to find something. He hadn’t been listening to a word I had in my mind rationalizing what his little brother was doing right now. It was denial, and he didn’t want to have to face the truth.

And I couldn’t make him. Maybe it was for the best that we all lived in our own little world.

My stomach was sick, but I knew it wasn’t because of all of the words Devon had said about something that I looked forward to over long, uneventful days. I knew it was because this was the eleventh letter.

There would only be fourteen letters before I would lose him—again.

I tightened my fingers on the paper. It crinkled and creased under my fingers, but I couldn’t bring myself to relax. I wanted to hold onto this piece of him for as long as I possibly could before I would lose it forever.

I mentioned that you were going to need Devon’s help for some parts of this hunt, and this is it.

After this letter, there is only going to be three more. It feels weird, knowing that this is slowly winding closer to the end, but I need you to be strong, Gia. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Eventually, everything that I’ve been asking you to do will make sense, and we will all understand something here. I just can’t tell you yet. I need you to find out when I know you will be ready.

In only a few more letters, you will be ready.

You need to have Devon with you to do some heavy lifting. That’s not sexist remark—you’re going to need him there to lift you up, Gia. Because I think I’m about to break you down.

~*~

“The school?” Devon asked, surprised, before he turned to me with narrowed eyes. “Isn’t it closed and locked in the summer?”

I gave him a blank look before I took a deep breath. He muttered something to himself before he buried his head in his hands, shaking his head.

“Oh, jeez,” he said.

Devon wanted to be a prosecution lawyer, one of the good guys. His brother had told me everything about him, telling me that he was one of those people that wanted to change the world, but he didn’t let that piece of him show out in the open until he got to the courtroom. His brother had seen him in a mock trial that Devon had performed with one of his pre-law classes at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, that he and his mother had gone down to watch him secretly. His brother could barely put it into words as he told me about how Devon had taken a case where he had no evidence good enough to clear all reasonable doubt, but he used undeniable circumstance and his words in a way that doubt was the last thing on your mind when you looked at him. It was like a stage play, he told me. Like the script had been carefully written and all of these elements put in there for a reason, but instead it was impromptu, and Devon hadn’t known anything about this case until he had walked into the mock courtroom an hour earlier that morning. His brother had told me that it was like Devon was in his element then, like he was doing what he was made to do.

Devon, obviously, liked rules.

He didn’t seem like it with the entirety of his personality, but he was the overall voice of reason most of the time. He still did some morally questionable things but they were never illegal. He knew just how far he could stretch and transfigure the law and twist it to work in his favor if the occasion called for it. He read law books like I used to read books about fantasy before reality began to feel too much just like those books for me to handle right now. Devon knew a lot of things about what is legal and what isn’t.