I didn’t tell her everything was fine.

She didn’t ask me to.

For once, my mother let the silence belong to both of us.

PART 14

The letters Walter had left with Paige became a private map back to myself.

I read one every Sunday, sitting at my kitchen table with coffee cooling beside me and Buster stretched across my feet.

He wrote about mundane things: the price of seed, a neighbor who insisted his mule could predict storms, and a pie he had baked badly enough to feed to the birds.

But hidden in those ordinary details were years of support I’d never known he had offered.