Mark used to tell me what to write. Little things Hannah had done that year. Things she would want her mother to know about. He’d lie next to me in bed and whisper, “Say something about her
science fair project. She worked so hard on it.”
Denise mailed every single one. In eleven years, she never once asked me why.
I stopped when Hannah turned eighteen. I told myself she was an adult now. She was old enough
to understand that sometimes parents just don’t show up. I couldn’t keep pretending forever.
On her eighteenth birthday, there was no card.
Hannah didn’t say anything about it. She didn’t wait by the mailbox anymore. She was getting
ready to leave for college. She acted like it didn’t matter.
But that night, I walked past her room and saw her sitting on her bed, holding the shoebox where she kept all those cards. Reading them, one by one.
