“Thank you.” She waited for me to leave but there was one last thing I needed to say.
“I’m truly sorry about your loss.”
Her eyebrows drew close as if she wasn’t sure what I was talking about.
“When I read in your letter that your entire family died, it touched me deeply. I can’t even imagine what you must be going through.”
Her head turned down and she muttered a low “Thank you.”
“I hope you will one day have a large family again, because family is everything.”
Devina raised her gaze and stared at me with the strangest look before she turned around and walked into the darkness of the beach with only her flashlight to guide her.
“Remember to throw over a letter tomorrow morning,” I shouted after her.
“Okay.”
Leaving a defenseless woman on the dark beach was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.
CHAPTER 11
The Beginning
Devina
All the way home to my house, Tyton’s words kept repeating in my head: family is everything.
It had been my nana’s last words and now I couldn’t stop wondering if his saying it was a sign.
I have to stop overanalyzing everything. Look where it got me with Wilma’s letters.
After taking a hot shower, I crawled into bed only to toss and turn unable to fall asleep.I’ve been to the other side of the border. I’ve spoken to a real Nman and I’ve met one of the rarest women in the world. A woman of the North.
No one would believe me if I told them, and still I felt like shouting it to the world.
Lying in my bed, a story began taking form in my head about a curious woman who began corresponding with an Nman as big and dangerous as Tyton.
She would ask him all the questions that I would never dare ask and she would venture out in the Northlands and explore their culture.
Exciting scenes of being a spectator at a bridal tournament played out in my imagination. My main character would be witty, fierce, and twice as brave as me.
Eventually, I dozed off and when I woke around ten the next day, the story was the first thing on my mind.
I didn’t worry about packing stuff into boxes. All I could think about was getting all my thoughts and plot ideas down on paper.
Getting out my mother’s electric typewriter, I sat down and poured the words from my head onto the paper.
It was a forbidden letter from the North. Deidra knew it the moment she picked it up. She should have left it there among the leaves and dirt on the ground, but the sad truth was that an unexpected letter was the only interesting thing that had happened to her in months.
Not many people lived in this rural border town and as far as she knew, she was the only one who ever came this close to the protective wall.
At least ten of the locals had warned her not to get close to the border wall and told her horrible stories of the savage men who lived on the other side. And yet, the wall had become the only place Deidra felt young, reckless, and fully alive.
When Deidra first took the assigned position as a caregiver at the local community home, no one had told her she would be the youngest person in a twenty-mile range.
It wasn’t that Deidra disliked her job. But she was twenty-five and if she lived the rest of her live without another game night, she wouldn’t complain.
Opening the letter in her hand she began to read but after no more than a single line, her head was exploding with questions about who the sender was. Turning the paper around, she saw a name: Mark.
