Twenty minutes later I began to process what had happened; my hands and legs started shaking, heart pounding, lungs gasping for air.

I shouldn’t have told her. The letters had been to encourage her, at first. She was the leader of the Women’s Co-op and had been for 8 years, since she was TWELVE , for god’s sake; she has wrested control from The Fathers who wanted to keep the girls locked away, and then formed the co-op where all 80 girls that survived The Plague now stayed.

I immediately began sending her anonymous letters of encouragement; books on leadership, planning, theory: Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War, Sun Tzu, Paine’s Common Sense.

Why? Because I loved her.

Yeah, loved her. Yeah, when she was twelve. And I was…. a lot more than twelve. And if I had left it there, encouragement, it would be okay now.

But I didn’t. I started to include affection, desire, longing. I waited, though; six years, until she was 18. But I was too cowardly to confess my involvement.

Until today. Her 20th birthday.