The letter took three months to arrive. Landon had a theory regarding the Scottish postal service that centered on an abundance of murky distilled beverages derived from the mud of ancient peat bogs, but he wouldn’t bore you with the details even if pressed. That was unusual for Landon, not to linger in the details. Landon’s mind was a cross between a sponge and a steel trap. He remembered every book, article, and poem he’d ever read; every conversation he’d ever had, from the life‑changing to the inane; and every birthday and anniversary of anyone he’d spent even an hour with. It wouldn’t surprise anyone who knew Landon that he remembered exactly what Rose had been wearing the day they met, right down to the socks that poked out of her too‑tight Keds and the smudge of lipstick on her front tooth that prompted him to say, too loudly, “You’ve got something on your teeth.” He remembered the way the flush spread across her face like a glass of red wine seeping through white carpet. Most vividly, he remembered the feeling, his very soul pounding on the confines of his gangly frame, voicing something that sounded an awful lot like “I know her, I know her!”

When he sent the letter, Landon was banking on the shared history he and Rose had started writing the day they met to say so much of what he could not. She would change her mind, if only she could remember his shy smile, plaid sweater vest, and exceptional aptitude for saying the right thing at the wrong time; if she could remember how they used to be when the world was simple, love conquered all, and nothing had shattered them.

Landon knew a lot of things. Everyone on his Thursday night trivia team agreed. But he did not know everything. And he could not have known that as his letter languished somewhere between here and there, Rose had already taken the pill that would upend the world as he knew it.

But she had. And it did.