Everything We Didn't Say

They both wrote. Neither one ever knew.In September of 1961, the Hartley Bend post office took four feet of water, and everything that could be carried went up a ladder into the attic. One canvas sack never came back down.Sixty-six years later, a contractor opens the ceiling.Maren Collier works at the Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta, the last room a piece of mail goes to when nobody can figure out where it belongs. She has opened something over a hundred and fifty thousand strangers' letters in eleven years, lawfully, at exactly the distance she chooses, and she has not written one herself since 2014.Tobe Cantrell has carried Route 2 for sixteen years. Sixty-one miles, three hundred and ninety-four boxes, six days a week. He is the only person alive who can name those envelopes, and nobody in Ashpole County knows what he does on Sundays.On the fourteenth of June, she finds two bundles that have been four inches apart since 1961. Eighty-eight letters written to a girl who stopped coming to the general delivery window, and sixty-one written by that same girl, every one of them stamped RETURN TO SENDER and sent back to a window she was not standing at.Both people who wrote them are still alive. One of them is eighty-five years old and lives four blocks from that building.Book six and the finale of the Hartley Bend series. Sweet, closed-door, and with a guaranteed happy ending. Each book stands alone.