Alfred had not ceased beginning letters to Zelda Fisk, even though he still hadn't been able to finish one that he actually felt inclined to send. If he'd been keeping all of his unsent drafts he imagined he might be able to fill an entire drawer of his desk with them by now, but of course he always got rid of them. Some of them he started with apologies, some with excuses. Sometimes he tried to pretend the whole night when they'd last seen each other had never happened, and just write to her as though she was only a cute girl with a crush and he was just an adventuring sailor and there was nothing more to say between the two of them then telling her little things about the voyage, but sooner or later those letters broke down as well. Avoiding the elephant in the room felt too superficial, but addressing it was impossible, and as a result any letter that he started, no matter what tack he chose, always ended with some sarcastic, scrawled line like Of course if you wanted to be exchanging letters with a cad like me, you would have written yourself.

That was really the crux of it, in the end. He'd told her that he wouldn't be more than a few days away by owl, and that she could write to him. Whatever she was doing now, and however she was coping with what the two of them had done, she hadn't tried to include him in any part of it, which must have meant she didn't want him involved. He didn't blame her, not even a little bit — but how could he presume to write to her when she had made it quite clear through her silence that she had no intention or desire to be writing to him?

He spent a lot of time wishing things had happened differently. It wasn't even that he necessarily regretted having slept with her — that he had given little thought to, as it seemed pointless to waste time worrying over something that no amount of worrying could undo. He did, on the other hand, regret that the entire ordeal fit so neatly into the category of a drunken mistake, the kind polite people sometimes made but never talked about again. At this point, that was the way the whole situation seemed poised; she could easily assume by his silence that he was inclined to move on and try not to think about that night, and sooner or later that was what would happen, and they would probably never speak again except perhaps a few times, awkwardly, in passing, and both of them would be relieved when the interaction was over.

But it could have been so different. He could have taken the time to get to know her, beyond just that first interaction on the beach at the Sandition. They could have exchanged long letters and gone out of their way to see one another and spent hours talking in low voices together. He could have pointed out all of the constellations visible in the night sky from England, and told her about the ones you could see just past the horizon if you sailed that direction. He could have kissed her sometime when the mistletoe hadn't been forcing him to, and he could have held her in his arms some evening and just taken in the feel of her body and the smell of her hair without moving on to anything at all, and then if they had tumbled into bed together before he'd left, at least it would have meant something. Instead, he was quietly fading into the background of her life as a drunken mistake, and she was doing the same for him.

It was because of all of those could have beens that Alfred kept starting letters. No matter what could have been, though, there was only one thing that was, and the reality of that prevented him from ever finishing them.