She waited for Kathy to shut the door, for the squishy footsteps of her sneakers to fade down the hallway before she reached for her glasses on the side table, perched them on the edge of her nose. Her red manicured nails maneuvered into the corner of the envelope, slid along the flap. It held a single paper folded into thirds, squared letters in black ink. Penmanship she didn’t recognize.

Dear Mrs. Enzenebner…

The author didn’t know her well. Gertrude had never been anyone’s “Mrs.” (This unexpected reminder stung). “Ms.” had always sounded too drab. She’d chosen “Miss,” clung to the title long after she’d outgrown it, longer still, after her usage seemed uncouth. “Miss” embodied the younger, fun aunt who imbibed a little too much schnapps at family gatherings. It fit her perfectly.

I’m trying to find out some information about my father, Vijay Khanna. I think you may have known him. Or at least, he knew who you were. He had this address for you among some of his old papers.

Her hands opened. The paper dropped into her lap. She slid her fingertips underneath the lenses of her glasses, kneaded the skin. She located the name again, grazed it with her nail to make sure what she read was real, that the words in the letter were not yet another hallucination.

Vijay.

The sweet little boy she once loved as her own.

The memory came to her in a flash: Vijay in a baseball cap, the lid grazing his thick eyebrows, a head that didn’t quite fill it, hair that peeked out from the side, curled around his ear like a hook; two slightly buck front teeth, a gap between them; a small, hard fist pounding into a baseball mitt she’d given him for his eighth birthday.

A later memory: Furniture, dozens of boxes, Vijay’s bike, Deepa’s plants loaded into a moving truck. Their empty apartment. Scraps of packaging paper tumbling in the cross breezes, swirls of dust covering the hardwood floor like beach sand shaped by waves. That raw, hollowed out feeling in her gut.

Gertrude had lost her first family to the war, her second family, the one she created with Deepa and Vijay, to betrayal. If she could go back and relive those last days with Vijay, how different they would have been!

She glanced back at the letter. I don’t know what kind of relationship you had with my father, or when you were last in touch with him. Perhaps you know he passed away thirty years ago.