Excerpt from Letters to the Lost by Iona Grey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Most of it was anonymous junk offering free delivery on takeaway pizzas or bargain deals on replacement windows. She tried hard not to look at the takeaway menus, with their close-up photographs of glistening, luridly colored pizzas, as big as bicycle wheels. In among them she found a newsletter from All Saints Church with "Miss Price" scribbled at the top, and several flimsy mail order catalogs selling "classic knitwear" and thermal nightwear addressed to Miss N. Price.

No mention of Mrs. Thorne.

She tossed the church newsletter onto the junk pile and stretched her cramped spine. The idle curiosity that had prompted her to start the search had faded when it yielded no instant answer, and the pizza photographs made her feel irritable and on edge. Since she wasn't even supposed to be here it was hardly her responsibility to make sure the letter reached its destination, and it wasn't as if she didn't have enough of her own problems to sort out. She didn't need to take on anyone else's.

But still …

She got up and went over to the fireplace, sliding the letter out from behind the clock. "Personal and Urgent"—what did that mean anyway? It was probably nothing. She knew from Gran that old people got in a state about all kinds of random things.

The paper was so thick it was almost like velvet. In the gathering dusk it was difficult to make out the postmark, but she risked taking a step toward the window to squint at the blurred stamp. Bloody hell—USA. She turned it over and read the message on the back again, running her fingers over the underlining where the ink had smudged slightly. Tilting it up to the dying light she could see the indentation in the paper where the pen had scored across it, pressing hope into the page.

Personal and Urgent.

If possible …

And before she knew what she was doing, before she had a chance to think about all the reasons why it was wrong, she was tearing open the envelope and sliding out the single sheet of paper inside.

The Beach House

Back Creek Road

Kennebunk, ME

22 January 2011

Darling girl,

It's been over seventy years and I still think of you like that. My darling. My girl. So much has changed in that time and the world is a different place to the one where we met, but every time I think of you I'm twenty-two years old again.

I've been thinking a lot about those days. I haven't been feeling so good and the meds the doctors have given me make me pretty tired. Not surprising at ninety years old, maybe. Some days it seems like I barely wake up and lying here, half sleeping, all those memories are so damned vivid I almost believe they're real and that I'm back there, in England, with 382 Squadron and you.

I promised to love you forever, in a time when I didn't know if I'd live to see the start of another week. Now it looks like forever is finally running out. I never stopped loving you. I tried, for the sake of my own sanity, but I never even got close, and I never stopped hoping either. The docs say I don't have much time left, but I still have that hope, and the feeling that I'm not done here. Not until I know what happened to you. Not until I've told you that what we started back then in those crazy days when the world was all upside-down has never really finished for me, and that those days—tough and terrifying though they were—were also the best of my life.

I don't know where you are. I don't know if the house on Greenfields Lane is still yours and if this letter will ever reach you. Hell, I don't know if you're still alive, except I have this crazy belief that I'd know if you weren't; I'd feel it and be ready to go too. I'm not afraid of Death—my old adversary from those flying days. I beat him back then so I'm easy about letting him win this time around, but I'd give in a hell of a lot more gracefully if I knew. And if I could say good-bye to you properly this time.

Excerpted from Letters to the Lost by Iona Grey. Copyright © 2015 by Iona Grey. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.