There was a symmetry in it he hadn’t planned and couldn’t ignore.
The same box, the same ribbon, the same hallway cabinet — but where a decade of forged letters had once sat, engineered to keep a family apart, there were now three true ones, written in his own unpracticed hand, meant to hold it together.
He thought that was the whole story, really, compressed into a single object.
A forgery and a letter can look almost identical.
The difference between them is only whether the name at the bottom belongs to the person who wrote it — whether the thing is honest.
His brother had spent ten years perfecting a signature that wasn’t his.