Most could not see inside the box, but they could see Elena, and they could hear the conversation through the microphone she had taken.

She stared at an envelope, then at the next one.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“How is this possible?”

Then she looked straight at me.

“How dare you?”

I had spent fifteen years protecting my daughters from believing they had caused their mother’s absence.

I had not kept the box to punish her in public.