It was my answer to a question I hoped they would never have to ask.

I have thought a great deal, over the years, about the strange discipline of keeping something like that box, of preserving the record of your own rejection and refusing either to use it or to destroy it.

There were nights, early on, when I wanted to burn the whole thing, to be rid of the returned envelopes and the unopened cards, because each one was a small fresh wound to look at.

And there were other nights, later, angrier ones, when I imagined confronting Laura with all of it, spreading it out in front of her and demanding that she look at what she had thrown away.

I did neither.

I simply kept it, sealed, in the dark, and let it be.

Because I had understood something about my daughters even when they were small: that a child who is lied to about a missing parent, even lovingly, even to spare them, will feel the lie eventually, will sense the shape of what is not being said.

And I did not want to lie to them.

I wanted the truth to exist, somewhere, intact, so that if the day came when they needed it, it would be there, whole and undeniable, and I would not have to ask them to simply take my word.

Chapter 2 — A Name I Hadn’t Seen

Then, just days before my oldest daughter Samantha’s wedding, my phone chimed on the kitchen counter while I was standing there checking the final wedding payments, and I looked down and saw a name on the screen that I had not seen there in years.

Laura.

My ex-wife.

The mother of my six daughters, who had vanished from all of our lives fifteen years earlier and had, in all that time, sent almost nothing back.