Some of them were mailed to an address Odile found at thirteen and came back marked.

Most of them were never mailed at all.

My children wrote eleven hundred letters to their mother over eight years and hid them from me, in my own house, because — Odile told me this in the storage unit, flatly, as though it were obvious — we didn’t want you to think we missed her.

Bin four was shoes.

Fifteen years of outgrown shoes, one pair per child per year where she could find them, and where she could not, a photograph.

Ximena had kept a bag of them for reasons nobody has ever explained.