They were unpacking one evening, the boys underfoot and delighted in the way children are during any upheaval, when Mason found the old scuffed blue suitcase in the back of a closet.

He dragged it out and opened it, and inside, still bound in their rubber band, were the returned, unopened letters — the ones my mother had blocked, the ones Rosalind had saved for six years, carried from apartment to apartment, unable to throw them away and unable to bear reading them.

“Why did you save these, Mom?” Mason asked, pulling one yellowed envelope out and turning it over in his small hands.

Rosalind looked over at me, and I saw her decide to let me answer it, and I came and knelt down on the floor beside my son.

“Because some people tried very hard to make sure those letters never reached me, Mason,” I said.

“Your dad wrote them a long time ago, when I didn’t know where you were.