The girl’s letter went in it.

So did a worn photograph she had not been able to look at for eighteen months and now could, a picture of a young pilot grinning sideways at the camera with a flight line behind him, Gabriel Torres, twenty-nine years old forever, her wingman and her friend.

And so did a drawing.

Leo had made it a few weeks after they came home, at the kitchen table with the fat crayons he was nearly too old for and still loved, and he had presented it to her with the gravity children bring to their important works.

It was an airplane, a lopsided generous airplane with too many windows, and in one of the windows he had drawn two stick figures holding hands, a big one and a small one, and above them a yellow sun taking up a quarter of the sky.