"You didn't talk to him," Monique said. It was not a question.
"No."
"Good." She wrapped her scarf tighter. "Some stories don't need more characters."
He almost laughed. "Andrew would have hated that. He always wanted a bigger audience."
"Andrew isn't casting anymore," she said gently. "You are."
That night Thomas took out the unmailed letters from the garage box and read them all, one after another, at the kitchen table. They spanned twenty-five years of a one-sided correspondence with the dead. Birthday wishes. Angry paragraphs. Descriptions of the divorce, of their mother's last days, of the first time he met Marcus and Monique when they moved in — a young family, a moving truck, Ava in a stroller chewing a plastic giraffe. He had written to Andrew about the new neighbors without knowing that Andrew already knew Marcus's face, Marcus's voice, Marcus's particular way of being kind without performance.
The irony was almost too literary to bear. Life, Thomas thought, did not care about subtlety. It stacked its coincidences until the structure groaned, and then it sent an eight-year-old barefoot across a lawn to make sure you noticed.
He kept one letter out — the one written the night after their father's funeral — and burned the rest in the fireplace with a solemnity that felt right and also faintly ridiculous. The smoke rose. The paper blackened. The words he had sent nowhere returned to nowhere, and he found he did not mind. The letter that mattered had already arrived. It had arrived late and sealed and in the wrong desk, and it had been enough.