The first letter arrived in September, three weeks after Katya landed. Four pages, both sides, the handwriting cramped and slanting as though the pen couldn't keep up. She described the apartment — high ceilings, radiators that clanked before dawn, a window onto a courtyard where someone practiced scales every evening. She described the walk to the institute, the colleagues, the particular shade of grey the river turned in late afternoon light.
Nora read it twice, then a third time. Not for the content. For the pressure.
The pen had pressed hard on certain words — finally, exactly, home — and skimmed over others. Miss you was nearly illegible, written so fast it looked like a single gesture rather than two words. The period after it was a divot in the paper.
The second letter came eleven days later. Three pages. The handwriting had loosened slightly, the slant less extreme. Katya had found a bakery that made something close to the poppy seed rolls from Lisiewicz, though the dough was wrong in a way she couldn't name. She'd started running along the river in the mornings. She was sleeping better.
Nora held the pages up to the window. The pen impressions showed where Katya had crossed things out and written over them. One erasure, near the bottom of the second page, had been so thorough it had thinned the paper. Whatever had been there was gone absolutely.
By November the letters came weekly. The handwriting settled into something Nora hadn't seen before — not the rushed scrawl of the first letter, not the careful print Katya used for lab notebooks. Something in between. A hand that had stopped hurrying and hadn't yet become careful.
Katya wrote about work. She was careful about detail — the protocols she was learning, the equipment she had access to, the collaborators and their habits. One colleague ate sunflower seeds at her desk and left the shells in a ceramic cup she never washed. Another arrived at six every morning and left at four, as regular as a transit schedule. Katya described these people the way she'd once described specimens — with precision, without interpretation.
Nora wrote back. Her letters were shorter. She didn't know what was happening until she reread her own drafts and noticed she was writing about the apartment: the leak under the kitchen sink, the draft from the bedroom window, the way the floorboards had started to separate near the radiator. She was reporting on the building as though Katya had left it in her care rather than left it.
In January, Katya's handwriting changed again. The letters of individual words were more distinct, more deliberately formed. She had slowed down. She wrote about the cold, about how the darkness arrived at three and didn't lift until nine. She wrote about missing light in a way that was plainly not about light.
Nora read the January letter standing in the kitchen, coat still on. She could feel the deceleration in the ink — each letter placed rather than drawn, the spacing between words widened as though Katya were pausing between thoughts instead of racing through them.
She didn't write back for two weeks. When she did, she wrote one page, front only. She wrote about the poppy seed rolls, how she'd found the bakery Katya meant and the dough was wrong because they used butter where Lisiewicz used lard. She wrote: I walked past the institute today. They painted the door.
That was the whole letter. She didn't reread it. She addressed the envelope and walked it to the post office in the rain because she knew if she waited until morning she'd add a second page, then a third, and the handwriting would start to slant.