The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which Maren found appropriate. Nothing of consequence had ever happened to her on a Tuesday, and she had been waiting, in the low-grade distracted way of someone who reads about adventure rather than having it, for the pattern to break.
She was working the afternoon shift at Cardigan Books — secondhand, three aisles, a bell above the door that rang with the specific cheerfulness of something that had no idea how quiet the shop was — when she felt something slide from between the pages of her copy of Outlander and land on the glass counter with a small sound, like a clearing throat.
The envelope was cream-colored. The ink was the deep, particular rose of a wine stain that had lived in good linen for decades. Her name was written on the front in a hand trained for a different century.
Miss Maren Ellis.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she looked at the page she'd been reading — Jamie Fraser frozen mid-sentence, mid-Scotland, mid-1743 — and thought: I have spent my entire adult life reading about other people's love stories and I am not sure what this says about me, but I suspect the letter is going to have opinions.
She opened it the way she opened anything she suspected might change things: carefully, at the edge.
Miss Maren Ellis, it began. You have been found.
The Thornwick Academy for the Study of Romantic Literature extends its invitation, with the compliments of the faculty, to the 2024 cohort of Inklings. You are among twelve women selected from across the United Kingdom and abroad on the basis of literary sensitivity, narrative instinct, and a quality the Academy's founders called the Readiness — an openness to experience that most people train themselves out of by the age of thirty, and which you have maintained, admirably, despite considerable effort to suppress it.
You will arrive in the village of Glenfauld, Perthshire, on the morning of September the fifteenth, by whatever transport you prefer. A vehicle will collect you and your fellow Inklings from the village green at nine o'clock. You may bring one case. You may bring books — we have plenty, but prefer our students to arrive with their own. You may bring questions. We cannot promise they will be answered immediately, but we can promise they will, eventually, be worth the asking.
You are invited to study with us for one academic year. You will learn to write romance. More accurately: you will learn what romance actually is.
Please do not discuss this letter with anyone. Not because secrecy is required — though it is — but because you will find yourself unable to adequately explain it, and the attempt will only make both you and your listener uncomfortable.
With anticipation, Elowen Thornehill Headmistress, Thornwick Academy
Maren read it twice. Then she turned it over and found, in smaller writing at the bottom: P.S. — Yes, the ink is that color intentionally. Yes, we know you've written six novels. No, you shouldn't have deleted them.
She put the letter down on the counter.
She picked it up.
She said, aloud, to no one: "Oh."
The shop bell rang. A woman came in looking for a birthday gift for someone who "reads anything," which was what people said when they hadn't paid attention to what the person actually read, and Maren helped her find something and made the correct noises and processed the transaction and all the while the letter sat on the counter beside the register, cream-colored and rose-inked and the most direct thing anyone had ever said to her.
She had written six novels. She had deleted all of them. She had never told a living person about either fact.
When the woman left, Maren picked up the letter again and read the postscript three more times.
Yes, we know.
She closed the shop at six. She locked the door. She walked the twelve minutes to her flat above the curry restaurant on Commercial Street and sat on her bed with her coat still on and reread the letter until she had it memorized, which took approximately four readings because she'd always been able to memorize things she cared about.
She thought: this is clearly a hoax. She thought: but who would know about the novels. She thought: Glenfauld is a real village, I've driven past it. She thought: one case. She thought about the Readiness — the thing the letter had named — and felt it prickling at the back of her sternum where it always lived, the specific warmth of being nearly ready for something.
She had felt it her whole life. She had never had a word for it before now.
She got up and started making a list of what to pack.