I walked into my company party and found my husband’s arm wrapped around a coworker’s waist, and then, in front of everyone, he told me I had never been anything more than his housekeeper.

She was tiny, with a cap of white hair and my exact eyebrows.

She hugged me for so long that Ben finally cleared his throat.

Then she hugged him too.

On her kitchen table sat a Buster Brown shoebox, soft with age, tied with kitchen string.

“Marie wrote to you every March third,” Joan said. “Thirty-six years. She never mailed one. She said, ‘If she ever wants them, she’ll find me.’ I was supposed to wait until you did.”

I untied the string.

Inside were thirty-six envelopes, each marked in blue ink, To Laura Ann, with the year in the corner.

The first one was dated 1981.

The last was March 2016, six weeks before she died, and the handwriting wandered across the page like a river.

I read it right there, at the table, with my daughter’s hand on my back.

Marie told me about the day she had stood outside the Novak house in Toledo in 1994 and watched a fourteen-year-old girl ride a bicycle down the driveway.