Without looking at Mama, I pried up the corner of that first envelope to see if the second was also addressed to Papa. It was, and the third, and the fourth, and the last. There were fifty or sixty letters in front of me, and all were directed in Mama’s bold round script—to my dead father—in care of the postmaster of Middle Haven.

Was she mad? I turned over the many pictures I had of her silent form moving through our house, but too quickly these gave way to the more indelible one of her at her desk, her head bent as she wrote. I shuddered with the realization that all through the lowering darkness of the winter, she had been writing to Papa.

Mama held up the letter she had been reading, and I took it nervously, unable to look at her, and read:

My dear Mrs. Thomas,

Postmaster McGovern arrived yesterday with your letters and begged that I return them to you, wanting them to arrive, he said, with a friendly, rather than official, hand. I have taken the liberty of tying them up in a ribbon I wore after my own Fredrick passed away. My dear lady, do not think I am insensible to the sorrow these letters bespeak—and, I pray, do not think me forward if I say this sorrow, madame, never vanishes. I pray for your sake that it lessens. Mr. Thomas’s grave is well tended in the churchyard—I have seen that your directions were carried out exactly. Though he is gone to our God, he remains in some way up here, and perhaps instead, of resting in Brooklyn this summer, as you had indicated last year, you might pass it here. Come and stay for the full season rather than the two months you have been used to. Come and see that the nearness of his grave will ease, rather than heighten, your grief. Yours very truly—

Anabelle French

I was struck by Mrs. French’s kindness, and further by a depth of sentiment I would never have envisioned in the woman I was used to thinking of with a slight ridicule—the plump little body, with her dog and her flushed cheeks and officious air, was now irretrievably complicated by this rich voice of understanding. Then the sorrow of it all flooded in, the awful sorrow in the stack of Mama’s letters: written and stamped, then sent and now returned, unopened and silent as himself.

“Mama,” I said miserably to the letters in front of me. She picked up my hand and stroked it, and my tears rose up at her touch. We sat together for a while without speaking, her hand covering mine.

“We will take Mrs. French’s advice, I think,” Mama said, a deep calm replacing the tempest of sorrow in her voice.

“To do what?” I turned to her.

“To return to Grange House,” she said softly. “To him.”