I found a little key taped under the glove box in my husband’s truck. No tag, no label, nothing. I was only in there hunting for the insurance card because mine had expired, and my fingers brushed something stuck up under the lip of the compartment.

A flat little brass key with the corner of the tape curling up. I sat there in the driveway for a good while just turning it over in my hand, not thinking much of it. I figured it was for a shed or an old lock. I was wrong about that.

Took me two days to figure out it was a post office key. Wouldn’t you know it, the number was stamped right on it once I held it under the lamp. 1147. So on my lunch break that Thursday I drove down to the post office on Main, the one we’ve used going on thirty years, and I went down the wall trying it on the little brass doors. Box 1147 popped right open. Inside was a stack of envelopes held together with a rubber band. Handwritten, every one of them. A whole pile.

I’ll be honest with you, my hands went cold before my brain even caught up. The return address was a state prison up in Kentucky. The handwriting was small and careful, the kind they teach you in grade school that most men lose by forty. I took them out to the truck and counted them at the wheel. Twenty-three letters. They went back four years. And every single one was from a man named David Trask.

Now I have to back up so you understand what that name did to me. David Trask is the man who killed our son. Drunk behind the wheel, doing way too fast on the county road, back in the spring of 2019.

Our boy Cole was twenty-two. He’d just finished his welding certificate and he was driving home for Sunday dinner. He never got there. David got eight years. I sat in that courtroom and watched them walk him out in the orange jumpsuit, and I promised myself I’d hate that man till the day I died. I meant it, too.

My husband Dale and I have been married forty-one years. He’s a quiet man, always has been. Fixes things instead of talking about them. After Cole he got even quieter, and I just figured that was grief sitting on him the same way it sat on me. I cried. He didn’t, much. I used to get so mad at him for that. I thought he’d gone cold on me. Turns out he hadn’t gone cold at all. He’d just taken his grief somewhere else, somewhere he never once told me about.