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Ellen Marsh has walked along the same beach in Norfolk almost every morning for twenty years. One cold Tuesday in March, the sea left her a present: a green glass bottle with a roll of paper inside. Over the years she has found old shoes, plastic toys and even a child’s homework, but never a real message in a bottle.
Ellen restores old books for a living, so she knew exactly what to do with wet paper. At home she opened the bottle, carefully dried the letter and read the faded words under a bright lamp. A man called Arthur had written it almost thirty years earlier, when he was seriously ill and did not have much time left. In the letter, he told his daughter Grace that he was sorry about their argument and that he had never stopped loving her. He could not send it, because Grace had moved away and left no address, so he gave his last words to the sea.
That evening, Ellen read the letter again and again, and her head filled with questions. Who was Arthur, and what had happened between him and his daughter? The letter mentioned a small fishing village in Cornwall, so Ellen drove there the next weekend. An old fisherman in the harbour told her that Arthur had died years before, and that Grace had come back for the funeral and then moved to Bristol.
Three weeks and many phone calls later, Ellen was standing in front of a small house with a blue door. When a grey-haired woman opened the door, Ellen simply said, “I have brought you a letter from your father.” Grace read the letter twice without a word, and Ellen waited by the window, afraid that she had made a terrible mistake. Then Grace explained that they had argued about her wedding, and that her father had died before she found the courage to call him.
“I have carried this anger for thirty years,” she said quietly, “and now it is finally gone.” Today the letter hangs in a small frame in Grace’s kitchen, and the two women still write to each other – on paper, of course.