is the only one in the whole stack with anything written inside beyond a line.
Four pages. He wrote it in the November of 1986, five months after the wedding, three months after the letter, in a rented flat with a nine-month-old asleep in the next room.
It says all of it. The party, the September, the ring in the drawer, the four minutes at a kitchen table, the decision. Everything he took two hours and forty-one years to say to me in a hospital.
He wrote it down in 1986. He wrote it all down when he was twenty-one and it was fresh and he could still have fixed it, and he put a stamp on it, and he put it in a shoebox.
Sam says he has read it once and will not read it again.
And in the February, on the anniversary of his son’s birth, I
