“I don’t know,” Gail admitted, and at least she was honest about it.

“I genuinely don’t know.”

Silas knew the answer to that question, or thought he did.

When I asked him about the letters that afternoon, he went up to his room and came back down carrying an old cardboard shoebox, soft at the corners, and set it on the table and opened it.

Inside were dozens of letters, in his handwriting, growing up year by year through the stack — birthday cards, holiday notes, little updates, a child asking a younger child how school was going.

Copies, all of them; he had kept a copy of every letter he sent.