A Thousand Letters (The Austens #2)

by Staci Hart

"I didn't know," he breathed. "I would have come back before leaving for deployment. I would have married you then, if I'd known you'd been begging me to come back that whole time. The answer I wanted was given to me over and over again, piled up in a locker in the dark. And when … when I read them, I knew there would be no going back. I believed at the time that I'd lost you forever without even asking you because how could you ever forgive me? I pushed you and blamed you, and you believed I didn't want you because I didn't come home. I could have married you then, but I had too much pride. I was young, young and stupid. And by the time I realized how wrong I'd been not to reach out to you, it had been years. Your letters had stopped. You were through. But I kept writing you back, every day, even after you stopped. I never stopped loving you, even though I thought you had stopped loving me."