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Letters are not to be trusted in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s stories. They are late, eternally deferred, and, when, or if, at long last they finally reach their destination, they are seldom true to their words—as if fin-de-siècle New England had lost its faith in correspondence. With only expectations to live on, Freeman’s women characters spend their lives waiting for a letter that never comes, or keep receiving letters that fail to correspond either to themselves or to their supposed author. Nonetheless, Freeman’s Fidelias, Sallys and Eglantinas abide, filling the blank left by the lover’s departure, or mere absence, with their faithful endurance, spinning the yarn of their lives in spite of, or maybe because of, the breach of contract, or the lack of correspondence. This paper explores the gaping temporality which allows female characters to speculate on the interval granted by the letter’s “non-coming,” or the lack of coincidence between the letter and the body with which it corresponds. Capitalizing on the missing, deferred or inadequate letter, they make the most of the delay and embroider absence into a fiction of their own.