I read them in order. I’m not proud of it, but I sat at the kitchen table that night and read every last one. The first was dated three months after the sentencing. It said, “Mr Garrison, I killed your boy.

I have no right to ask anything. But I think about him every day.” And stapled behind it was a photocopy of my husband’s answer, in Dale’s own blocky printing. He wrote back. He actually wrote the man back. “David, I don’t forgive you yet. But my pastor says anger is a chain.”

Anger is a chain. He never once said anything like that to me. I was the one hauling the chain around, dragging it through every holiday and past that empty chair, and the whole time my husband was sitting at this same table writing letters to the man who put it on us. Four years of them. Back and forth, like two old pen pals. David would write about how he couldn’t sleep. Dale would write back about Cole. Little things. The time he flooded the lawnmower. The way he ate cereal straight out of the box standing at the counter.

There was one where Dale wrote, “I dreamed about him last night and woke up reaching for the phone to call him.” I never knew my husband had that dream. He told a stranger in a cell before he told me. And there was one from David that said, “I don’t pray for forgiveness. I just pray you and your wife are sleeping at night.” My name was in those letters. Mine. And I’d never read a word of any of it until I was sitting there with my reading glasses sliding down my nose, feeling like I didn’t know the man I’d slept next to for forty years.

I’ll tell you something else I’m not proud of. I never read the whole police report on the accident. Couldn’t do it. I got through the first page, saw the words “blood alcohol,” and shoved the rest of it in a drawer and never opened it again. I figured I knew the whole story anyway. Drunk man, fast car, my boy dead. What else is there to know. That’s what I told myself for seven years, and I held it tight like it was the truth.