The house had to be cleared by Monday, when the new owners' painters were scheduled to arrive, which gave Divya and her brother Anil two days to sort thirty-one years of their mother's belongings into three categories: keep, donate, and the skip parked at the end of the driveway. They worked in separate rooms without discussing the arrangement, Divya upstairs among the wardrobes, Anil in the study among the papers, a division of labour that let them spend the whole of Saturday under the same roof while exchanging perhaps eleven sentences, most of them about where to find tape.

It was in the back of their mother's wardrobe, behind a stack of saris no one had worn in a decade, that Divya found the shoebox, tied with the same red string their mother had used to tie everything, and addressed, in her mother's handwriting, simply to Anil. Inside were perhaps forty letters, unstamped, unsent, spanning what the postmarked years on a few enclosed newspaper clippings suggested was nearly a decade. Divya read one, standing in the closet doorway with her coat still on. It was short, and almost embarrassingly ordinary -- an account of a garden that had not done well that year, a complaint about a neighbour's dog, a single line near the end asking, without any apparent bitterness, whether Anil still took sugar in his tea. She did not read a second one. She put the lid back on the box and sat with it on the edge of the bed for longer than she would afterward be able to account for.

Downstairs, later, dividing the kitchen's contents into the same three categories, Anil held up a chipped mug and said, mostly to himself, that their mother had always liked Divya's visits better than his, that everyone had always known it, that it had simply been a fact of the house the way the creak on the third stair was a fact of the house. He said it lightly, the way people say things they have said to themselves so many times the saying has stopped hurting, or has hurt for so long it no longer announces itself as hurt at all. Divya, wrapping glasses in newspaper with her back to him, said nothing about the shoebox upstairs, or about the sugar in the tea, or about thirty or forty afternoons her mother had apparently spent writing to a son she then, for reasons the letters themselves never explained, did not send a single page of it to.

She thought, packing the car that evening, about mentioning the box directly, handing it to him with some explanation attached, some interpretation she could offer alongside it. She decided against it, in the end, for a reason she did not examine very closely, and simply placed the shoebox, still tied with its red string, into the crate of items already marked with his name, between a desk lamp and a set of chess pieces missing two pawns. Whether he would find it that night or leave the crate sealed in his own garage for another year, whether he would read all forty letters or none of them, was a fact about the future Divya had no way to reach from where she stood in the driveway. Anil, loading the last box into his own car, glanced over and held the door of hers a moment longer than the wind required. Neither of them said anything about it. It was not a resolution. It was not nothing, either.