I drove to Gwen’s house feeling like I was chasing a ghost I’d already buried. Yet when she opened the door with Andrew’s mouth and tearful eyes, it didn’t feel like a ghost at all. It felt like walking back into a story I’d been written out of. In the attic, surrounded by dust and late light, I opened the first envelope and met the boy I’d loved as the man he’d tried to become. A father writing into silence, year after year, to a child he could not reach and a girl he believed had turned away.

On the drive home, Leo slept with his hand on that box, as if he could anchor eighteen stolen years by touch alone. The grief was sharp, but underneath it was something steadier: the knowledge that love had not failed us. People had. Andrew hadn’t run. He had reached, and reached, until there was nowhere left to send his hope.