Let me take you down the route, because you can’t grieve what you can’t see, and I have spent thirty-one years seeing these people when no one else did.

There’s the Petersen place, four miles in, where the school bus doesn’t come till late and the three kids wait at the box, and I’ve handed those children their own first letters and watched them grow tall enough to reach the mailbox that used to tower over them.

There’s old Odell Prewett, the hermit they call him, who hasn’t spoken a full sentence to another soul in years and won’t, but who leaves a jar of his honey in the box for me every September, wordless, which is Odell for I see you too. There’s the Bakke farm, and the Coleman place gone to ruin, and the trailer where the young couple fight and make up in cycles I could set a calendar by.

And there’s the newest one, the little rental at the county line, where a young woman named Krista moved in over the summer with a toddler and no ring and no car half the time and a look on her face I recognized from my own mirror eighteen years ago — the look of someone drowning quietly, alone, in a place where she knows not one living soul.

I have been watching Krista the way I watch all of them, which is to say carefully, and I had already decided, before the letter came, that she was one who needed more than her mail.

What I hadn’t reckoned was how little time I had left to give it.