Matching script quotes on two ribs

The tide came over the causeway again last night, so the post boat didn't reach the island until gone noon, and I have your letter open on the table beside the ink pot, with a stone holding the page flat against the draught. You wrote that the lighthouse at Scarrow Point is lit now, and that Mam stands on the cliff path every evening at six, looking out for a ferry that isn't coming. I read that line twice. I am sorry I left her to do it.

Here is what I have been thinking since the spring. The old castle above the harbour, the one with no roof and the jackdaws nesting in the arrow slits, has a stairwell that still holds the echo of a bell nobody has rung since the war. I climbed it on Sunday with Tom from the net loft, and at the top, where the wall breaks open to the sea, he asked me whether distance was a kind of sum you could work out. I told him no. I told him you and I had worked it out already, in the back of the schoolroom, in chalk.

Enclosed is the card the printer in Rowan Street made up for me. Turn it over. I had him set the two lines in his old copperplate type: together forever never apart on one side, and maybe in distance but never in heart on the other, the way we used to write our initials in the margins of each other's exercise books. I know you will think it soft. It is not soft. It is the only sum I trust.

Write back soon, and tell Mam the ferry is coming on Thursday, whether or not it is.

Your sister, Ada