But I could never bring myself to read the letters in the polished box. I liked to look at them, to run my hand across their spines and feel them flutter past. They were together in that box, my mother and my father, and when sleep was about to catch me, I sometimes imagined I could hear their muffled voices. One night I sneaked into Da’s room and crawled like a hunting cat into the wardrobe. I wanted to catch them unawares. But when I lifted the lid of their polished box, they went quiet. A terrible loneliness shadowed me back to bed and kept me from sleeping.

The next morning, I was too tired for school. Da took me to Sunnyside, and I spent the morning beneath the sorting table with blank slips and coloured pencils. I wrote my name in different colours on ten different slips.

When I opened the polished box later that night, I nestled each slip between a white envelope and a blue. We were together now, all three of us. I wouldn’t miss a thing.

The trunk beneath Lizzie’s bed began to feel the weight of all the letters and words.

“No shells or stones. Nothing pretty,” Lizzie said when I opened it one afternoon. “Why do you collect all this paper, Essymay?”

“It’s not the paper I’m collecting, Lizzie; it’s the words.”

“But what’s so important about these words?” she asked.

I didn’t know, exactly. It was more feeling than thought. Some words were just like baby birds fallen from the nest. With others, I felt as though I’d come across a clue: I knew it was important, but I wasn’t sure why. Ditte’s letters were the same, like parts of a jigsaw that might one day fit together to explain something Da didn’t know how to say—something Lily might have.

I didn’t know how to say any of this, so I asked, “Why do you do needlepoint, Lizzie?”

She was quiet for a very long time. She folded her washing and changed the sheets on her bed.

I stopped waiting for an answer and went back to reading a letter from Ditte to Da. Have you considered what to do when Esme outgrows St. Barnabas? she asked. I thought about my head popping through the chimney of the schoolroom and my arms extending out the windows on both sides.

“I guess I like to keep me hands busy,” Lizzie said. For a moment I forgot what I’d asked. “And it proves I exist,” she added.

“But that’s silly. Of course you exist.”

She stopped making the bed and looked at me with such seriousness I put down Ditte’s letter.