The letters were dated but never sent. She found them in the cedar box after the estate sale, postage unpurchased, addresses in a hand that knew cursive like a second language learned young.
They were written to her. Not by name — by description. The one who takes the house. Forty years of correspondence with a future tenant, instructions threaded through gossip and complaint. Where the faucet sticks. Which neighbor will offer help that isn't. How the garden produces more zucchini than anyone could want and why you should let it.
She read them in order, the way you'd read a novel. The faucet had been replaced. The neighbor had moved to Tucson. The garden had been paved over for a parking pad she now rented to a college kid with a motorcycle.
The letters described a house she didn't live in. Every correction was precise and useless — the right answer to a question the building had stopped asking. She kept reading anyway. Not for the advice. For the woman writing into a dark she'd furnished with guesses, each one wrong in a way that proved she'd been paying attention to something real.
The last letter apologized for not finishing the kitchen trim. It's harder alone, she'd written. Not the work. The deciding.