We Will Love Again – Episode 38
Alaina read Noah’s letter at the kitchen table until dawn. It contained no anger because he had written it before bitterness hardened around him. He described Oxford, loneliness, and the foolish hope that she might call.
The final page held the future he still imagined for them. He promised that success would mean nothing if he could never share it with her.
Alaina cried for the young couple who had loved each other fiercely and trusted each other too little. The letter could not restore them, but it proved how long Noah had waited before giving up.
She called him shortly after sunrise. His voice became alert when he heard hers.
“Your mother gave me the letter,” she said.
Noah fell silent. He remembered writing it in a dormitory room, then entrusting it to Nora because he lacked the courage to send it directly.
“I didn’t know she kept it,” he said.
“Would you have come home?”
“Yes.” The answer arrived without hesitation. “That was why she never gave it to you.”
Alaina understood Nora’s fear, though understanding was not absolution. A single delivered letter might have destroyed the sacrifice Alaina made.
“Can we meet?” she asked.
They chose a small ice-cream shop far from the hotel and office. It was not the one from their hometown, but the familiar smell of sugar and waffle cones made the years fold strangely around them.
Noah arrived without an assistant or driver. He ordered Alaina’s old favorite from memory, then asked if her taste had changed.
“Some things did,” she said. “Not that.”
They sat near the window, two adults trying not to pretend they were still twenty-two. The letter rested between them.
“I’m glad you succeeded,” Alaina told him. “I hate what we did to get you there.”
“So do I.” Noah looked at the handwriting of the man he used to be. “I spent years believing pain was the price of ambition. It made me good at winning and terrible at everything else.”
Alaina reached across the table, then stopped before touching his hand. Noah closed the remaining distance but did not hold her there.
The contact was brief, warm, and more intimate than a kiss would have been. It asked for nothing beyond the moment.
When they left the shop, a photographer stepped from a parked car. By evening, images of their meeting were online beneath a headline announcing that the billionaire had reunited with the woman behind his scandal.