Inside were dozens of sealed, unmailed letters, addressed in a child’s careful hand to my military unit overseas.

I opened the one on top.

In Hannah’s shaky, second-grade printing, it read: Daddy, Aunt Veronica says you don’t love me anymore.

If I did something bad, please tell me how to fix it.

The room went completely silent.

Veronica stopped pleading.

And I stood there holding a letter in which my seven-year-old daughter, alone and frightened, had assumed that her father’s silence must be her own fault, had racked her small conscience trying to figure out what she had done to lose my love — and had written to ask me how to fix it, and had trusted her aunt to mail it, and her aunt had hidden it in a tin behind a clock.

It was, I understood in that moment, the truest and ugliest summary of everything my sister had done.