“She’ll send one,” Hannah said. Her voice was very small. “She has to. It’s my birthday. Moms always send cards on birthdays.”
No card came. Not that day. Not that week. Crystal hadn’t sent a card on Hannah’s fifth birthday
or her sixth birthday either. She wasn’t going to send one on her seventh.
That night, after Hannah was asleep, I sat at the kitchen table for a long time. Mark found me there around midnight.
“What’s wrong?”
I told him about the mailbox.
He sat down across from me and put his head in his hands.
“I called her,” he said. “Last week. To remind her. She said she’d send something.”
“She didn’t.”
“I know.”
I looked down at the table. I’d been thinking about it for hours. It was a crazy idea. Maybe a terrible idea. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Hannah standing at that mailbox in the dark.
