Robert, Her Billionaire Widower

He enjoyed how candid she was, how normal and they started corresponding frequently via their letters. Robert realized that the woman he had found so attractive in her interview was the person that she truly was. She actually was that confident, she actually was that genuine, or at least it seemed so in the letters that she sent him. Robert began to feel immense attraction towards her, attraction that was starting to make him feel like he was falling in love.

He thought this was ridiculous at first. After all, how could he possibly fall in love with a woman that he had never even met? This was the truth, however. The bond that they shared was just that strong. He kept those letters safe and eventually their correspondence became such that they started to discuss personal aspects of their lives.

Marie told him about her past, about the fact that she had fought to get out of an incredibly abusive relationship and how she felt that it was important that everyone in the world know about this. He urged her to put it into her writing and she assured him that she would eventually, after she had gotten over it a little and was able to think of it in more objective terms.

However, after a little while something odd happened. She stopped replying to his letters. He wrote her time and time again but she stopped replying and he wondered why that was.

He began to think that he had said something wrong. He thought of contacting her in some other way but they hadn’t exchanged email addresses or numbers or any other means of contacting each other. He tried to search for her email address online but that only ended up giving him an official business email that he could use to contact her agent.

He thought that perhaps she no longer wanted to speak to him. This saddened him but he couldn’t really force her to talk to him if she didn’t want to.

*****

“I had no idea that that was what happened,” said Vanessa when Robert paused for a drink of coffee. “That’s so interesting. It’s such a romantic way to start a relationship. But, at the end of the day, that’s not how you started your relationship, right? Because you two were no longer in contact, how could you possibly have started your relationship through your letters.”

“Yes,” said Robert, “that’s true. That was not the start of our relationship, rather that was how we started corresponding for the first time. I think it’s important to know that we started talking through letters because it fits Marie’s public image which, and this doesn’t surprise me, is exactly who she truly was.”

“I think it’s important too,” said Vanessa. “So why did she stop responding? Did she no longer want to talk to you? Had you said something that upset her perhaps?”

“No, it was nothing like that,” said Robert. He chuckled and said, “The reason is rather mundane, to be very honest. We just stopped talking through letters because all of her letters were being checked by somebody, and that person simply didn’t forward my letters to her probably because he never read them. They threw away two thirds of the mail she received because she had started to receive so many letters, so naturally my letters got thrown out with them. If I had kept writing her perhaps she would have gotten one of my letters but I figured that she had not wanted to talk to me so I wasn’t about to keep sending her letters hoping that she would respond. I found this out much later when we finally met by chance. Would you like to hear about that now?”

“Yes,” said Vanessa. “We’ve established that the two of you started talking at first because you were a fan of her writing and wanted to compliment her. Now we should move on to when you two reestablished contact. But first, I wanted to ask. Didn’t she eventually realize who you were? You were a pretty famous guy especially back then because of the whole sweatshop scandal. Did she never put two and two together?”

“Oh no,” said Robert, “I never told her my full name you see. We never talked about my work, I just told her that I was a businessman and that was the end of that. She didn’t really want to push me into telling her about it either which I really appreciated. So no, she never sought me out because she had no idea who I really was. To be honest if I did not already know about her I would have never known who she really was either because we never talked about that kind of stuff. We focused on things like our interests and our hopes and dreams.”

“That’s quite beautiful,” said Vanessa.

“It is,” said Robert with a wistful smile. “Now, I shall begin telling you about the time we first met.”

*****

Robert had been invited to a party and he was rather nervous about going. It was a literary party and he was afraid of bumping into Marie who he was sure would be there. Robert had always been a patron of the arts and had often given grants to aspiring writers so that they could finish their novels without having to worry about their financial struggles. This was why he had been invited to the party that Marie had also been invited to due to the fact that she was such a well known literary figure by this point.

It had been three months since Robert had last spoken to her and he assumed that she simply did not want to talk to him anymore. He worried that things would get awkward when they met in person. He would have to tell her, of course, that he was the very same Robert that she had talked to so regularly for those few months they had been in contact. He did not think she would want to talk to him after she found out who he was and he didn’t blame her.