Love script and fingerprint heart on wrist

The ink came from the bakehouse soot mixed with the gum Mr Haskett uses on parcel labels, and I pressed my thumb into it three times before the whorls sat right. You will laugh, but I could not manage Father's. His ridges wore flat hauling eel traps out of the mere for thirty years, so in the end I drew the heart around the place where his thumb would have gone, going by the way he held his tea cup.

The sheet is folded inside this one. Keep it flat. The forest has been breathing its damp into the sorting room all week and the envelopes come out soft as bread. Mrs Penrose at the counter says a letter this heavy must have something worth the stamp, and I told her it was only a word and a bit of skin, which is what love mostly is, if you ask a postmistress.

You wrote that the city has taught you to keep your hands in your pockets. I have been thinking about that since Tuesday, when the ferry bell rang across the water and I went down to the landing for no reason at all. Nobody came off it who knew me. I stood there anyway, pressing the print I had kept back, the one I did not send, against the cold rail until the ink picked up the rust.

So I am sending you the sheet, with the word love looped round the heart the way you always said I loop my vowels, too wide. Come home at Michaelmas. Bring your own thumb. We will press them together on the back of the bakehouse door where Father chalked our heights, and see whether the ridges still agree.

Yours, with flour on my sleeve, Hetty