I set my fish tape down real slow, because when I worked that wooden box out from between the studs and lifted the lid, there was no money inside, nothing a thief would want. There was a tiny white christening gown, yellowed with age, folded soft, and under it a bundle of letters tied with a faded ribbon.
The letters were all addressed to the same name, a babys name, in a womans hand, and not one of them had ever been sent, because they were written to a child who never got to grow up.
The young couple who hired me, expecting their own first baby that very autumn, stood in that dining room and went quiet as a church. We read the top letter together, careful, and it told the whole sad story. The woman who lived there decades ago had lost a baby, and the room we stood in had been the nursery, and she had sealed the gown and the letters inside the wall of it so that a piece of her child would always be in that house, safe where no one could throw it away.
A grieving mother had hidden her lost babys christening gown inside the nursery wall so her child would never truly leave the house, and there it had waited through every family that lived there after, none of them ever knowing they slept beside a mothers whole broken heart.
The letters were the kind a mother writes when she cannot let go, one on each birthday the child never had, telling the baby about the seasons, the garden, how much she was missed. The last one was dated forty years ago.
The young wife, with her own hand on her belly, cried so hard her husband had to hold her up. And then she did something I will never forget. She said they were not going to throw any of it away. They tracked down the woman who wrote the letters, and found she had passed on, but her surviving daughter, a sister the lost baby never met, was still living an hour off.
That daughter came. She had known, all her life, that her mother lost a baby before her, but she never knew where the little gown went, the one from the family photographs. Her mother would never speak of it. And here it was, whole, cared for, pulled from a wall by a vacuum line.
She took the gown home. The letters too. But she asked the young couple if she could leave one letter behind, sealed back in the wall, so that a piece of her mothers heart would stay in the house that held it so long. They said yes. Eighteen years I have fished tubing through walls and found nothing but old nails. I did not know a wall could hold a mothers love for forty years. Now I do.