Dear Aunt Nora,

My name is Paige Vance. I am eleven. I am my mom’s daughter, Brenda, who is your husband’s sister. I don’t know if you remember me.

I am writing because I turned eleven in February and I worked out that eleven is how old Lia was.

I have wanted to write to you for about two years and my mom said no. I am not telling her I am doing this. I have my own email now because of school.

Here is what I want to say. I am sorry about the dog. But I want to be honest that I don’t remember most of it and I don’t think it was my fault, and my mom has told me it wasn’t my fault approximately one million times, which is how I know that some people think it was.

What I actually want to ask is whether Lia would talk to me. I don’t have any cousins here. I don’t have anything to say to her, I just want to know what she’s like, because I have thought about her every single year on my birthday since I was seven and I don’t know one single thing about her except that she had a dog.