My wife left me with our six daughters for a wealthy man. Fifteen years later she texted to say she’d be at our oldest daughter’s wedding — and my daughter told me to let her come, because she had already prepared a special welcome for her.

We sent the first three in the March.

They came back in April. All three. RETURN TO SENDER stamped across the front, in that purple ink the post office used then.

I stood at the mailbox at the end of the drive at two in the afternoon in my work clothes and looked at three envelopes with my daughters’ handwriting on them.

And I made a decision in about eleven seconds that I have gone over roughly ten thousand times since.

I put them in my jacket, and I went inside, and when Junia asked whether her mom had written back yet I said not yet, sweetheart, the mail’s slow.

I could not do it. I want anybody reading this to sit with that for a second before they judge it. My oldest was nine. I was not going to hand a nine-year-old an envelope with her own handwriting on it and a stamp saying refused.