My fingers closed around a thick envelope wrapped in yellowed tape.
Not money. Not jewelry either.
Inside were photographs. Dozens of them. Old Polaroids and drugstore prints of my ex-husband as a teenager standing beside that vanity with his grandmother. Christmas mornings. Fishing trips. One picture of him asleep in a recliner with his head in her lap while she watched TV. At the very bottom was a folded stack of letters tied together with fading blue ribbon.
I sat cross-legged on the guest room floor reading them for almost two hours.
They were all from his grandmother to him after his parents divorced. Real grandmother stuff. Reminders to eat breakfast before school. Complaints about her neighbor’s barking dog. Little five-dollar bills taped inside birthday cards she apologized for being “late on account of Social Security.” But the longer I read, the stranger it felt that he’d hidden them so carefully behind a drawer nobody would ever think to check.
Then I got to the last letter.
It was written shaky and crooked compared to the others. She talked about getting sick, about knowing she probably wouldn’t be around much longer. And in the middle of it she wrote, “I hope one day you stop pretending not to care about people before they get the chance to leave you first.”
I just sat there staring at that line.
Because suddenly the vanity made sense. Him throwing it at me during the divorce. Acting like it was worthless junk. Not even checking the drawers before it left the house.
A week later I called and asked if he wanted the letters back.
There was this long silence on the phone before he quietly said, “I wondered where those went.”
I mailed the box the next morning.
Kept the vanity though.