The letters between Kael and Cece had become, over two years, a significant document. He kept hers in a box under his bunk at camp and in a drawer at Hillview during school year. She kept his, she told him, in a cedar box that had been her grandmother's, which he thought was appropriate.
Her November letter that second year was six pages, which was on the longer end of their correspondence and indicated something was on her mind that needed space to say.
She wrote about Baron Samedi. She had been developing her own relationship with him — not as a supplicant, not as someone asking for things, but as someone paying attention, the way her mother had taught her. She wrote: 'He doesn't speak to me the way he speaks to Mama. But I can feel when he's pleased and when he's watching and when something I've done has registered with him. It's like — you know how you know someone is in a room without seeing them? He's in a lot of rooms.'
She wrote about school, where she was doing well in ways that surprised her teachers and didn't surprise her: 'Mama says people who grow up paying attention to things most people can't see develop a different relationship with information generally. I think she's right. Everything has layers. Once you know that, you stop accepting the surface as the whole story.'
She wrote: 'I've been thinking about what you said about not treating people as characters you already know. I think you're right and I also think you underestimate how hard it is for you specifically. You came into this world knowing the story. Treating people as people who are still writing their own stories requires active work for you in a way it doesn't for most people. I see you doing that work and I want you to know I see it.'
He put the letter down and looked at the ceiling of his room at Hillview for a long time.
She was right. She was, as she consistently was, exactly right, and she was saying it not to help him manage a situation but because she had observed something true about him and thought he deserved to hear it.
He wrote back twelve pages. The longest letter he'd sent her. He told her about Lantern Step. About Luke and the arena conversation and what he was afraid of. About Annabeth and what it was like to meet someone who thought at the same speed. About his father's visit and the medical training program. About Thalia's Pine and what it felt like to sit against the bark and feel the warmth of someone who was dreaming inside wood.
He wrote at the end: 'You said you see me doing the work of treating people as people rather than characters. I want to tell you that you are one of the people for whom that work is easiest. You have never felt like a character to me. You felt like a person from the first Monday red beans. I don't know if that's because of who you are or because I loved you first and character-ness requires distance and I've never had distance from you. Either way. You are the most real person in either of my lives.'
He sealed the letter and sent it and thought: that is the truest thing I have written to anyone in two lives. He was glad he had written it.