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.

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.

I lied to my children about their mother for a decade and a half to keep them from a purple stamp.

I have been asked since whether I regret it. I do, and I would do it again, and both of those are true at the same time and I have stopped trying to sort them out.

PART 3 — WHAT JUNIA DID

Two years ago I moved out of the rented place on Fennimore into a small house I finally managed to buy, and Junia came over on a Saturday to help me clear the attic.

She found the box at about eleven in the morning.

I was downstairs. She was up there for forty minutes and did not make a sound, and when she came down she had the whole thing in her arms and her face was completely dry and completely white.

She said one thing. She said, “You sent every one.”

And I said yes.

She sat at my kitchen table for three hours and read them. Not all of them. Enough.

Then she asked me two questions.

The first was whether her sisters knew, and I said no, and she said, “They’re going to.”

The second was about the handwriting on the sixty.