street.

“You loving me doesn’t erase what you did,” I said.

He looked away.

My mother lowered her hands.

Her eyes were swollen and bright.

“I was afraid,” she whispered.

“Of what?”

“Of losing everything at once.”

I laughed, and it came out uglier than I intended.

“So you chose to let him lose everything instead.”

She flinched because she should have.

Then, in broken pieces, the rest of it came out.

Thomas had insisted the annual police calls were about boundaries and safety.

My mother had told herself that if David was removed quickly, the scene would stay small.

Some years Thomas made the call.

Some years she did.

She admitted something else too: she had never once closed the curtains before eight o’clock on Christmas Eve.

I stared at her.

She cried harder.

“It was cowardly,” she said.

“I told myself it was kindness.

I told myself letting him see the lights, letting him see you from a distance, was the only thing I could still give him.

But it was cowardice.

I know that.”

I left before either of them could ask for forgiveness I was nowhere near ready to offer.

The months that followed were strange and exhausting.

I kept my job in Philadelphia, but I spent nearly every weekend in Old Saybrook.

I cleaned David’s house.

I sorted the letters by year.

I learned the workshop the way some people learn the floor plan of an inherited grief.

I made tea from the box he left in the cupboard because coffee felt wrong there.

I read every letter.

They changed him from an outline into a person.

He wrote badly when he was angry and beautifully when he missed me most.

He worried about my fevers without ever knowing whether I had them.

He guessed at my interests from the shape of me at the window.

He was wrong plenty.

One year he was convinced I played hockey because he saw me carrying a long bag; it turned out to be a tripod for photography class.

He apologized in the next letter to no one.

Another year he wrote that I looked unhappy walking into the house after what he assumed was a bad date, and he hoped one day I would find someone who knew how to stand beside me instead of in front of me.

Somewhere in the middle of reading all that, rage gave way to grief.

Then grief gave way to something steadier.

I began repairing things in the workshop.

A cabinet hinge.

A warped drawer.

The old bench lamp.

I was not naturally good with tools the way David had been, but I liked the humility of it.

Wood tells the truth faster than families do.

In March, my mother came to the house alone.

I almost did not let her in.

But she was carrying a long narrow box wrapped in a faded dish towel, and something in her face told me this was not a performance.

Inside the box was a wooden train.

Hand-carved.

Painted in muted red and blue.

Small enough for a toddler’s hands.

“I kept it,” she said.

My throat tightened.

“What is it?”

“The first gift he ever tried to send you.

Your first Christmas.”

She sat at David’s kitchen table and told me