The Room My Father Built

And one was a photograph, taken with a phone, of a piece of paper on a desk.

It was a page from a legal pad.

It was my husband’s handwriting.

And it was my signature, written out, eleven times in a column down the left side, getting steadily better.

I sat on the floor of my father’s archive at half past two in the morning, in the dark, and looked at a photograph of a man practicing my name.

Toby had one more message under the images.