There was a box on my porch with no return address, and I almost left it out there till morning. I’m 71 and I don’t order much, so a package I’m not expecting just makes me nervous these days.

But something made me carry it in. I set it on the kitchen table next to my coffee and I looked at it for a good long while before I ever touched the tape.

When I finally opened it, there was a diary inside. Purple cover, a little water-stained at the corner. And the second I saw the handwriting on the first page, I had to grab the edge of the table. I knew that handwriting. I’d know it anywhere. It was my Lisa’s.

My daughter Lisa drowned 20 years ago this July. She was 14 years old. Lake Eufaula, a hot afternoon, the kind of day that’s supposed to be nothing but good. One minute she was there and the next she wasn’t, and I have lived every single day since trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. So you can imagine what it did to me, seeing her writing show up in a cardboard box two decades later.

There was a note folded on top. Plain paper, a stranger’s handwriting. It said, “Found this inside a wall during demolition of a house on Birch Street. Your daughter’s name is inside. I’m sorry it took so long.” That was all. No name, no number. Just a kind stranger who tracked down an old woman and mailed her a ghost.

Birch Street. I sat there saying it out loud to my empty kitchen. Birch Street was Kayla’s house. Kayla was Lisa’s best friend in the whole world, the two of them stuck together like burrs from the second grade on.

And I remembered, plain as day, the silly thing those two used to do. They’d pry up a loose board or find a gap behind the baseboard and hide their diaries in the wall, one at Kayla’s and one at ours, so nosy little brothers and snooping parents couldn’t get at them. I used to tease Lisa about it. “You think I want to read about boys, honey?” I’d say. And she’d just grin at me.

Well. I guess one of those diaries got left behind in that wall and stayed there all these years, right up until somebody knocked the house down. And here it was on my table.

I want to tell you I read it slow and careful, like I was handling something holy. But I’ll be honest with you, my hands were shaking so bad I could barely turn the pages. I opened to the front. January 2005. And there she was, fourteen years old, alive on the paper.