Birthday cards. A whole stack of them. Every single one sealed shut and stamped, like they were all ready to go in the mail and never went. I counted them later. Eighteen. Same name handwritten on every envelope, a girl’s name I’d never heard in my life.

And the return address up in the corner, in my father’s handwriting, was our house. The house I grew up in.

I opened the first one with my thumb. My hands weren’t real steady. “Happy 1st birthday. I think about you every day. I’m sorry I can’t be there. Love, Dad.” I had to read it twice. Dad. I sat there going, whose dad. Whose. I opened the next one. Second birthday, same gentle handwriting, same little ache in the words. Third. Fourth. Every year, one card, never sent. He’d been writing to some child his whole life and stuffing the proof in a shoebox where nobody would ever look.

By the time I got to the last one my hands were shaking so bad I could barely tear it. This one was longer. “You’re an adult now. I hope she told you about me. My name is William Haskell. 14 Birch Lane. I was 19. Your mother was 17. Her parents said I wasn’t enough.” That was it. That was the whole story, fifty years of it, packed into four little sentences on a drugstore card.

I have a sister. That’s what hit me, sitting on that floor with the dust all over my good slacks. My father loved a girl every single birthday for eighteen years and never had the nerve, or the permission, to mail one card. And my mother knew. My mother knew the whole time, and she locked that door so I’d never find out.