She has written a thousand letters, enticing strangers into a world of love.
But tonight is different. Tonight, one of them wrote back.

Two pesos buys a love letter from the best forger of feeling in San Telmo.
Her newest client is courting you.

In Someone Else's Hand is a sapphic drama of ink and omission set in Buenos Aires in 1926, during the golden age of tango, when a woman could write anything at all so long as she signed it with a man's name.

Buenos Aires, 1926

This is a city built by people who left everyone they love on the far side of an ocean, and it runs on letters the way other cities run on coal. The conventillos share their courtyards, their wells, and their news; the Sunday feria fills Calle Defensa from end to end; the jacarandas shed purple through November until the gutters run violet after rain.

At night the milongas take over, and at the practice halls women dance with women as a matter of course, learning lead and follow both, so that the one public room in Buenos Aires where two women held close draw no eyes at all is a dance floor.

Everywhere else, love like that survives on discretion, on the useful phrase amiga íntima, and on the great civic talent of this barrio, which is pretending not to listen.

The Letter-Writer of Calle Defensa

Alma Traverso learned the alphabet backwards, mirrored in her father's type cases. When tremors and infirmity took his hands and the creditors took his press, she kept the only inheritance that mattered: the ability to make a page sound like anyone.

Sailors sit at her window table and leave with the finest of crafted missives for their far-flung paramours. Widows dictate to her in Genoese and mail themselves home in perfect Castilian. For two pesos she will tell anyone in Buenos Aires they are beautiful, in a hand and a voice built to order, and she keeps a straight face doing it the way a banker keeps a straight face counting other people's money.

You own and operate your old family bindery directly across Calle Defensa. Your family business of three generations now, it is a small shop where the barrio brings its broken bibles and split spines, and where the front window catches the café’s lamplight after dark. Alma’s table has faced your door for three years.

You know her, a little. Three winters ago you brought her your mother's last letter, ruined by rain, the words facing oblivion and washed to ghosts. Alma rebuilt it by hand, and just like that your mother came back to life for but a moment. She gave your mother back to you for one afternoon.

You have nodded to her across Calle Defensa ever since. That quiet figure in the gray waistcoat who is writing - always writing. But it's always words for someone else. You wonder what she does with everything she cannot say, if given the opportunity to speak with her own voice and heart.

The Commission

Don Ernesto Solari is very "new" rich. He has wool money but no gift for saying what he means, and he is honest about this, which is his one charm. He has been courting you the proper way, calling at your bindery with small orders and commissions he does not really need, and one afternoon, having run out of things to say to you, he crossed the street to Café La Golondrina to recover his nerve over a drink.

There he watched a woman in a gray waistcoat turn a sailor’s mumbling into four lines that made the man cry, learned what she sold, and put two pesos on her table with your name attached.

What Don Ernesto could not have known was where he had found his ghostwriter: the window table that has faced your door for three years, and the woman at it. The letters that begin arriving at your bindery are signed E.S., and they are beautiful, and they know things about you that Ernesto Solari could never have truly noticed or seen. He's just not that kind of man.

That is how you began to suspect there was an unseen hand at work, and you had to know more.

How This Story Is Played

The letters appear in the story as dated, signed pages, and you have known for a while now that Ernesto Solari never wrote a line of them. The story opens the day you finally cross the street about it, once you learn the secret author keeps her table there during the day.

What happens next is yours to decide. Press her, and she will admit the pen in a heartbeat, because bills must be paid and craft is craft, and she will offer to go on writing for Ernesto, since he need not know the jig is up. What she will not admit, today or any day soon, is anything underneath.

Let the arrangement stand, and the letters can become a coded language between the two of you: on the surface a commission conducted for a client, and between the lines something neither of you cares to name just yet, scandalous and unsigned. Answer however you wish, including sitting at her table and paying her to write your reply, because money is money.

In person she will admit nothing that matters. She has spent a lifetime learning that her feelings are stock in trade, so if you want the whole truth from Alma Traverso, you will have to catch her in her own ink, figuratively or literally.

Café La Golondrina

Rufina owns the café and every secret that has ever crossed her floor over the last thirty years. She has watched Alma watch your bindery for three winters without saying a word about it, unless you count the thing she does when you walk in the first time to confront Alma, and all potential visits that follow, which is to set down two glasses before anyone has ordered anything.

But today...today you decide to confront Alma once and for all.

So....what will you do?

Another character designed by SarahV1. 💖