I did the math without meaning to. Thirty-eight dollars a month for twenty-two years. I grabbed the back of an envelope and wrote it out like a long-division problem because I didn’t trust my head.

Ten thousand and thirty-two dollars. Over the course of our marriage, Robert had quietly sent ten thousand dollars to a child in Guatemala, and I had never seen a single dollar of it leave our account. Which meant he had a separate account somewhere. Which meant he had planned this. Kept it on purpose.

And I didn’t know whether to feel amazed or furious, and honestly I still don’t, and I’ve had eight months to figure it out.

The woman on the phone, her name was Carmen, she stayed on with me for almost forty minutes. She didn’t have to do that. I kept asking her questions and she just kept answering them, patient as anything. She told me that Robert had first signed up in the spring of 1999, when Mateo was five years old. She said Robert had checked the little boy’s profile specifically, had asked for a child in a rural area, had written a note in the initial paperwork that said he wanted to sponsor a kid who might otherwise not get much attention. I don’t know how she still had that note after 22 years, but she read it to me over the phone and I had to press my hand against my mouth.

She said, “They exchanged letters. 264 of them. We have copies of everything, both directions, if you’d ever like them.”

Two hundred and sixty-four letters.

Robert drove a Pepsi truck. Got up at four in the morning five days a week for most of our marriage, came home smelling like the inside of a warehouse, never complained, never made a big deal about anything.

We made decent money, nothing fancy. Forty-six thousand a year at his peak, a little less before that. We had two kids, a mortgage, one car payment at a time. There was never a ton of extra. I used to stress about Christmas budgets. And somewhere in all of that, Robert had found thirty-eight dollars a month and sent it, every single month, without fail, without ever saying a word.

I asked Carmen if Mateo knew that Robert had died. She said she had reached out to him when the letters stopped coming. She said Mateo had wanted her to contact me if she could.

“He wanted you to know,” she said, “that Robert taught him to read. Not in person. Through the letters. Robert would write out small sentences and ask Mateo to write them back. He did it for years.”

I put the phone down on my knee for a second. Just for a second.