Gerald had intercepted every package. That was the first thing the box made plain. He would collect the mail before I ever saw the returns, mark my own gifts Return to Sender in a hand disguised to look like a postal stamp, and set them back on the porch for me to find, still wrapped, so I would believe his daughter had rejected them. Underneath the gifts were the letters Nadia had actually written me over the years, five of them, asking to come home, asking why I never answered her calls, asking what she had done. I never received one. He took those too. And there were the emails, printed, where he told her I had said she was not welcome in the house, that I found her difficult, that her father had a new family now. He had run the same lie in both directions for twelve years, and we had each believed the other had closed the door.

I understood, holding his handwriting, why Nadia left at seventeen and never came back. He had convinced a grieving girl that her father’s new wife had pushed her out, and convinced the new wife that the girl despised her, so that neither of us would ever compare notes. As long as we did not speak, the story held. The box was Nadia finally deciding to break it, because she had grown up, and grown suspicious, and started keeping copies of everything he sent her, and one day the arithmetic stopped adding up.

Gerald did not deny it. When I looked up from that first envelope, he was already moving toward the door, which is its own kind of confession. I asked him only one question, why, and the answer was the smallest, ugliest thing. He said he had not wanted to share me.