Diane held it for a long time.
Then she broke the seal.
Inside was a letter and a small photograph.
The photograph showed Mark standing in front of a half-built wooden desk. Beside him was my father, younger than I remembered him, smiling at the camera with a pencil tucked behind his ear.
I had never seen that photograph before.
On the back, my father’s handwriting read:
Two stubborn men, one good piece of wood, and a plan worth finishing.
Diane began to cry.
Not the quiet tears she’d shed when speaking about grief.
These were the tears of someone who had stumbled into a room she thought had disappeared forever.
She unfolded Mark’s letter.
He had written it after my father’s death, during the weeks when the workshop project had begun to unravel.
He wrote about how difficult it was to lose a person whose work he admired, and how he regretted that the two of them had never finished the desk.
