The morning came soft and gray, and I made the coffee the way I always did, strong, in the pot Colette said was too old to keep. I sat at the kitchen table in my cardigan with the keys to the yellow house tucked in the pocket, and I waited. At 7:40, I heard the mail slot, then Preston’s slippers scuffing down the hall. He carried the envelope into the kitchen, frowning at the return address, W and P Bait and Tackle LLC, the name he had seen a thousand times as a boy and never once truly read. “This is from the landlord,” he muttered, tearing it open. Colette drifted in behind him, phone in hand, only half listening.

He read the first lines aloud, about new terms effective immediately, and his voice slowed. Then he reached the bottom of the page, the signature line, the owner’s name written in the same steady hand that had signed his school permission slips and birthday cards for forty-two years. Marjorie Kellerman. Owner. He stopped. He read it again. Colette looked up from her phone at the sudden silence. “Preston?” she said. He turned the letter toward her without a word, and I watched her eyes find the name, then rise slowly to my face across the kitchen where I sat calmly drinking my coffee. “Why,” she said, her voice strange and thin, “does the landlord have your mother’s handwriting?”