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.

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.

So I kept them.

And then they kept writing, because children do, and I kept sending them, because I could not bring myself to be the one who stopped it, and they kept coming back.

Two hundred and eleven letters over fifteen years.

The bulk of them in the first four years — that’s when the little ones were young and still believed in it. Then it thinned out. Willa stopped at eleven. Cori stopped at nine and never started again. Bess only ever wrote two, both at Christmas.

Junia wrote the longest. She wrote until she was nineteen. Once a year, on the anniversary of the day, and I know that because I read the last one, later, with her permission, and it is four pages long and it is not angry and that is the worst thing about it.

Tansy has never written a word, because Tansy was nine months old and has no memory of the woman at all and has always, sensibly, treated the whole thing as somebody else’s weather.

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.