out of her life, pressured out by circumstances the letter described only in careful, restrained terms. But he hadn’t actually left completely, not in the way everyone around her had apparently assumed. He’d simply moved next door instead. Close enough to watch me grow up from across a shared fence line, for nearly four full decades. Never quite close enough to actually speak.
I sat there in the dirt for a long while, the letter trembling slightly in my own hands, genuinely unable to fit any of it into the
