Letter 68 - Today, I read your letters again.

The Ashford Diaries is a serialized gothic mystery unfolding day by day in letters from Ashford Manor. New here? → Start reading from the beginning.

July 7, 1947
Ashford Manor

My love,

Today, I read your letters again.

Not just one or two—all of them. Every folded edge, every smudge of ink. I spread them across the floor like a map, hoping they might guide me somewhere truer than memory.

But something’s changed.

Each line I once clung to now feels... doubled. As if beneath your words, another voice murmurs. One that knows me too well. One that knows you better.

“The stars weren’t visible that night,”
you wrote once,
“but you found the sky anyway.”

I remember that night. The orchard. The stillness. But now I wonder, was I the only one you were looking at beneath that moonless sky?

The phrasing in some letters, the repetition in others—it feels rehearsed. Reused. As though they were practiced first on someone else.

I don’t know if it’s the ink itself or something inside me that’s soured.

But when I read your words now, I feel them twice. Once in love, and once in fear.

—Calliope.

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— Dakkota Lane, author of The Ashford Diaries, a serialized gothic mystery unfolding letter by letter.