I walked down the narrow hallway to the utility closet. The door was heavy, the brass knob cold in my hand. Inside, the closet smelled of cedar shavings and old winter wool, the high shelves packed with blankets and coats we rarely used in the early autumn.
I searched through the lower shelves, moving a stack of old phone books from 2012 to find the blue plastic folder that held our financial records.
I reached up to the top shelf, my fingers brushing past the thick blue wool of the spare blanket we kept for the coldest January nights. Behind the blanket, tucked deep into the dark corner, sat the white cardboard box.
It was a plain storage box, the corners gray with dust and the lid slightly warped from the humidity of the midwestern summers. Inside that box were fifteen years of returned letters. Every birthday card, every graduation invitation, every small note the girls had written to their mother had been returned to this house, marked refused.
