The Last Letter from Your Lover

down around them. She’s always known what the deal was. She can’t claim to have been misled. But just how little could she reasonably be expected to take? It’s one thing when you know you’re loved passionately, and only circumstances are keeping you apart. But when there’s no sign of that to keep the whole thing afloat . . .
    ‘Ellie?’
    ‘Hm?’ She glances up to find ten pairs of eyes on her.
    ‘You were going to talk us through the ideas for next Monday’s edition.’ Melissa’s gaze is both blank and all-seeing. ‘The then-and-now pages?’
    ‘Yes,’ she says, and flips through the folder on her lap to hide her flush. ‘Yes . . . Well, I thought it might be fun to lift the old pages directly. There was an agony aunt so I thought we could compare and contrast then with now.’
    ‘Yes,’ says Melissa. ‘That’s what I asked you to do last week. You were going to show me what you’d found.’
    ‘Oh. Sorry. The pages are still in the archive. The librarians are a bit paranoid about making sure they know where everything is, what with the move,’ she stutters.
    ‘Why didn’t you take photocopies?’
    ‘I—’
    ‘Ellie, you’re cutting this a bit fine. I thought you’d have a handle on it days ago.’ Melissa’s voice is icy. The others in the room look down, not wanting to witness the inevitable decapitation. ‘Would you like me to give the task to someone else? One of the work-experience girls, perhaps?’
    She can see, Ellie thinks, that for months this job has just been a shadow on the radar of my day. She knows my mind’s elsewhere – in a rumpled hotel bed, or an unseen family house, conducting a constant parallel conversation with a man who isn’t there. Nothing exists but him, and she has seen right through me.
    Melissa’s eyes are on the ceiling.
    Ellie realises, with sudden clarity, the precariousness of her position.
    ‘I, uh, have something better,’ she says suddenly. ‘I thought you’d like this more.’ The envelope is nestling among the papers and she thrusts it at her boss. ‘I was trying to get a few leads on it.’
    Melissa reads the short letter, and frowns. ‘Do we know who this is?’
    ‘Not yet, but I’m working on it. I thought it would be a great feature if I could find out what happened to them. Whether they ended up together.’
    Melissa was nodding. ‘Yes. It sounds extra-marital. Scandal in the sixties, eh? We could use it as a peg for how morality has changed. How close are you to finding them?’
    ‘I’ve got feelers out.’
    ‘Find out what happened, whether they were ostracised.’
    ‘If they stayed married, it’s possible they won’t want the publicity,’ Rupert observes. ‘Such things were a much bigger deal back then.’
    ‘Offer them anonymity if you have to,’ Melissa says, ‘but ideally we’d like pictures – from the period of the letter, at least. That should make it harder for them to be identified.’
    ‘I haven’t found them yet,’ The tightening of her skin tells Ellie this was a bad idea.
    ‘But you will. Get one of the news journos to help if you need to. They’re good at investigative stuff. And, yes, I’d like that for next week. But first get those problem pages sorted out. I want examples I can lay out on a double-page spread by the end of the day. Okay? We’ll meet again tomorrow, same time.’ She is already striding towards the door, her perfectly groomed hair bouncing like a shampoo advert.
    ‘It’s Mrs Spelling Bee.’
    She finds him sitting in the canteen. He unplugs his earphones as she sits opposite. He’s reading a guidebook to South America. An empty plate tells of lunch already eaten.
    ‘Rory, I’m in such trouble.’
    ‘Spelt antidisestablishmentarianism with four “T”s?’
    ‘I let my mouth run away with me in front of Melissa Buckingham, and now I have to flesh out the Love Story to End All Love Stories for the features pages.’
    ‘You told her about the letter?’
    ‘I got caught out. I needed to give her something. The way she was looking at me, I thought I was about to be transferred to Obits.’
    ‘Well, that’s going to be interesting.’
    ‘I know. And before that I’ve got to go through every problem page in the 1960 editions and find their moral equivalent in the modern day.’
    ‘That’s straightforward, isn’t it?’
    ‘But it’s time-consuming, and I’ve got loads of other things I’m meant to be doing. Even without finding out what happened to