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.

They all went in a cardboard box in the attic, bundled by year with kitchen twine, which is a thing I started doing in year two without deciding to.

About sixty of them, spread over the whole fifteen years, did not have the post office stamp on them.

Those had a line of handwriting across the front instead.

Not at this address.

I knew that handwriting. I lived with it for eleven years. It was on the grocery list stuck to my refrigerator for two years after she left because I could not make myself take it down.

She was writing that with her own hand on envelopes addressed in the handwriting of her nine-year-old.

I never told the girls. Not once, in fifteen years. When they asked, in the early days, I said she was far away and that things were hard for her and that it wasn’t about them.