The shoe bin made everybody quiet and then made Teddy cry, which is the only time I have seen it.

And then the letters.

Eleven hundred and forty-one of them, written between 2011 and 2019, by five girls, on birthdays and at Christmas, and hidden from me.

They read them out loud.

Not all of them — it took three evenings and they got through maybe four hundred.

They read them out loud to each other, in a kitchen, at twenty-three and twenty-six and twenty and twenty-four and twenty-two and fifteen.

I was there for the first evening and I sat in the corner and said nothing.