I pulled up the corner of the rug beneath my bedroom window and found the board she meant right away. It had always creaked. I had meant to fix it for years and now I was glad I never had.
The nail heads lifted with a butter knife. Under the board, wrapped in an old pillowcase, was a flat wooden box. My hands were shaking so hard I nearly dropped it.
It was full of letters. Dozens of them, tied in faded ribbon, and every envelope was addressed but not one had ever been mailed. They were all to the same name. A man, with a last name I did not know, at addresses that changed and got crossed out and changed again over what must have been forty years.
On top was a note from Corinne. This is the boy I gave up when I was seventeen and had no way to keep him, and I never stopped writing to a son I could not find, so now I am asking you to be braver than I ever was.
Under the letters was a single sheet from one of those find-your-family services, and a name, and a phone number, and a city three states over.
I sat on my bedroom floor until the light changed. Then I picked up the phone.
His name is Daniel. He is sixty-one now. He had spent half his life looking for the mother who gave him up, hitting dead end after dead end, and he had almost given up hoping. When I told him who I was and why I was calling, there was a silence so long I thought the line had dropped. Then I heard a grown man start to cry.
He drove up two weeks later. I gave him the letters, all forty years of them, unopened by anyone but the woman who wrote them. He sat at my kitchen table and read them one by one, and I made coffee and left him to it, and every so often I heard him laugh and heard him break.
We drove to the cemetery together. He knelt at a grave he never knew he had, of a mother who never stopped writing, and he told her out loud that he understood, that he forgave her, that he wished he had found her in time.
Corinne could not manage to mail a single letter in forty years of trying. But she left them where she knew I would find them, and she trusted a neighbor to carry them the last mile of a road she could not finish.
Daniel calls me now. Every Sunday, without fail. He says I am the closest thing to family his mother left behind.
I told him he is wrong. His mother left him the biggest thing there is. She left him found.