Asked for love letters—no pressure, let me emphasize—the two obliged with thousands of words just from their August 1994 writings alone. Mostly the letters were from Sue whose feelings were more conveniently preserved in digital form than were the letters from Greg. He wasn’t holding back: He was the one who had contacted me about their romance. What followed from Sue was more affecting than anything I’d read in a novel, for it was real, and I learned about it in the same way that Greg did, through a series of pixels on a computer screen. Reading this one message would help explain why she was willing to leave Kansas City; why she felt that, regardless of a father with heart trouble, she had felt free to move on; perhaps even why she was willing to share her life so openly with me through this book, for a chronicle was an affirmation of sorts. New to me but old to Greg, the revelation did not come immediately. Sue’s August letters started out mainly with the routine, the glue of long-range relationships, the confirmation that she wanted Greg to know her life and likes. There was talk of food (“I love you more than I love munching on peanut butter and crackers”), diets (“I splurged on Chinese and probably regained the three pounds I lost”), art (at the Nelson museum she favored the impressionists), friends’ babies (“Barbara went to the doctor this morning to check and see how the baby was doing—she was about ten weeks along, and she had a miscarriage”), school (Sue was attending community college and could not resist sharing a few unabashedly corny jokes about her anatomy course), places to go on vacation (“Hey,” she said, in a discussion of Mount Rushmore, “do you Aussies get weird and chisel the faces of dead leaders onto mountainsides, or is that a distinctly American thing to do?”), and jobs (“this working full time and college at night is starting to wear me down a bit, but for the time being it’s what I want to do”). Like almost any woman she _planned_. The word was that Greg should wrap some paper around his fingers and snip it off at the right place and send the results on to her so she’d know the size of his ring. And should it be silver or gold? They discussed pajamas. “I always thought it would be cool to share a pair of PJs with someone,” Sue wrote. “I’d wear the tops, you’d get the bottom. Okay, so I’m cheesy, but I guess it’s the American upbringing :). Shrug.” In her mind Sue saw the “really cool chapel in Rapid City, South Dakota, where my grandparents on dad’s side renewed their vows for their fiftieth wedding anniversary.” “I wanna get married in it,” she wrote Greg. “There’s a place where you can light a candle for a loved one and say a prayer to keep them safe. Well, I lit a candle for Barbara, and then I lit one for us. It felt weird to be in a church for a good reason. Seems that all the last ones have been for funerals.”