The blue ink on the envelope flap was slightly smeared, just enough to catch the light from the kitchen lamp. I had been sitting at this table for two hours, watching the sunset bleed behind the Amarillo plains, and the silence in the house felt heavier than usual.

I had brought the latest return from the post office that afternoon. It was the one hundred and eighth letter I had written to Roger since he stopped speaking to me.

“If he refuses them, sir, there is nothing we can do,” the clerk had told me years ago. I remember how she looked at me with pity. That pity used to burn, but tonight, it felt like an anchor. I picked up my letter opener, the same silver one I had used since the day the divorce papers were finalized, and I looked at the seal again. It wasn’t my fold. The glue was bumpy and thin. My hands weren’t shaking, but my vision felt like it was narrowing down to a single point.

I didn’t open the envelope again. I knew what was inside. I knew the exact words I had poured onto that stationery because I had been writing the same truth for nearly a decade. I stood up and walked to the closet in the hallway where I kept the shoeboxes. I had labeled them by year. I started pulling them out, one by one, feeling the weight of nine years of silence sitting on the floorboards.

I picked a box from three years ago. I tore the tape off. Every single envelope in that box had been opened. Not by the post office, and certainly not by a stranger. My son had been taking these home. He had been reading every single word of my apology, every prayer, every desperate update about the ranch, and then he had resealed them so I would continue to believe he was rejecting me.

“Why would you do that, Roger?” I whispered. The house didn’t answer. I thought back to the morning he left, the day he packed his truck and told me I had chosen his father’s side, even though I had only been trying to keep the peace. I remember his face that day. He didn’t look angry. He looked disappointed. That was worse. I had spent years thinking I had lost him because of a misunderstanding.

I opened another box. This one was from the second year. Tucked inside the last letter, I found something I had missed before. It was a small, torn piece of notebook paper. It wasn’t in my handwriting. It was a grocery list from a store in town, and on the back, there was just one line written in Roger’s jagged, hurried script. “I’m still waiting.” That was it. My chest tightened until I had to lean against the wall to catch my breath.