side.
“Mom,” he said, and now the word sounded like an apology trying to find a shape. “Is it Dad’s?”
I looked at the blanket in my lap.
My anger had cooled by then into something harder.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
Madison said something in the background.
Kyle told her to stop.
It was the first time I had heard my son draw a line with his wife and not immediately sand it down.
I took the seam ripper from my drawer.
The tool was old, silver, and narrow, and I had used it for decades to undo mistakes one thread at a time.
I slid the point beneath the first stitch.
The pocket opened cleanly.
The envelopes were still there.
For one terrible second, I cried from relief because the insult had not touched the thing itself.
It had touched me.
It had touched Frank.
But it had
