The Last Letter

He had told her to look for a man holding a book of Portuguese poems. Half of the arrivals hall seemed to be holding something. Iris stood by the barrier with her suitcase and her heart in her throat, scanning faces, until she saw him: tall, grey at the temples, holding the battered book against his chest like a shield.

'Iris,' he said. His voice was lower than she had imagined, and warmer.

They did not touch at first. They walked. He showed her the city he had been describing for months: yellow trams grinding up the hills, tiled façades, viewpoints where the whole river spread out silver below. They ate grilled sardines at a plastic table and argued about translation exactly as they had in their letters, and every so often he would stop mid-sentence and look at her as if checking she was real.

On the third evening they sat on the steps of a viewpoint as the sun went down, and he took her hand without asking. She let him.

'Your letters were braver than you are,' he said, smiling.

'So were yours.'

She kissed him then, on the warm stone steps with the city turning gold beneath them, and it felt like the end of a very long sentence.

His flat was at the top of four flights of stairs, with a narrow balcony and shutters that banged in the wind. They left the shutters open. In the morning he wrote her a letter on cream paper and left it on the pillow, and she laughed so hard she cried.

Stay another week, it said.