Bin two was school.

Registration fees, field trip slips, lunch account statements, six sets of them, fifteen years.

Bin three was the letters.

There were, by Odile’s count, eleven hundred and forty-one of them, and they had been written between 2011 and 2019 by five of my six daughters, and I had never seen a single one.

They had done it in secret, from 2011, on birthdays and at Christmas — Odile started it and the others followed and nobody ever told me.

They had a shoebox and then two shoeboxes and then a plastic crate under Teddy’s bed.