She chose the counselor.

Afterward she told me the letter included an apology without a request that she forgive him immediately.

That mattered to her, though she didn’t want to write back yet.

“Can I just keep it in my drawer?” she asked.

“Absolutely.”

She folded it carefully and placed it beside a photo from when she was little, standing on Curtis’s shoulders at a county fair.

I watched her do it without telling her what that photograph ought to mean.