A single letter, and she had become psychologist, priest and storyteller all at once. A single letter, and she was captivated. She had always been drawn to letters — not just the pleasures of receiving them, but the concept of letter-writing, that very particular intimate, secret, and enduring communication. And she thrilled to the covertness of letters, like someone whispering in your ear, your ear and no one else’s.

As exciting as that first letter had been, it would have gone no further if she and Leonard had not decided to replace the flooring in the kitchen. She was pregnant again, and reading Virginia Woolf. (It was more auspicious, she thought, to read a female author during pregnancy, although perhaps better to have chosen one with children.) The plan was to finish the flooring well before the baby arrived. The old lino was the same grey-green monotony that covered so many floors in the 1940s and 1950s. The new lino was very striking: a black background with bright rectangles in primary colours, forming interlocking squares — striking and, compared with other kitchen floors she’d seen, rather daring. The work began with the removal of the old flooring. The underlay comprised the usual newspapers, not from the 1940s or 1950s, but the 1930s.

During the short period, just a couple of hours, before the papers were removed, Sylvie crouched down and read the floor. The top layer was mustardy with age, and stained with mysterious splotches, but the lower sheets were well preserved. She was shuffling through the pages, reading headlines and paragraphs, when she spied some handwriting, almost completely covered by a page of newsprint. She moved the newspaper aside to reveal a letter written on blue onion-skin paper. She scanned the contents, then knowing the floorer would soon be returning, quickly lifted and stacked all the sheets of newspaper. She found several more letters: some, like the first, written on blue onion-skin paper, others covering both sides of high-quality, no-longer-white parchment, but if she held the pages up to the light, she could still make out the watermark. By the time the floorer returned to remove the underlay, she had completed the job: old papers arranged in neat stacks for him to take to the incinerator, while she took possession of the letters.

She lost the baby, and began her letter collection. And she did not stop, not even with the pregnancy that produced the miracle of Andrew — the George Eliot pregnancy, and another female author like Virginia Woolf without children. (As were the Brontës and Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson. Someone with the education and the ability should investigate this disturbing pattern, Sylvie thought.) As her son grew, so did her collection. Now, after nearly thirty years, she had over two hundred letters, all in English except the single Russian letter with the 1951 stamp of the happy lemon-pickers. For the first time she wished she had not collected that letter, or rather, had not shown it to Leonard. Her letters, a subtle larceny that did no one any harm, were her own business.