Keston brought out the rest of the letters just after midnight. There were eleven of them, tied in the same faded ribbon and kept in a locked drawer beneath the desk. He laid them on the wood one by one, in order, and stepped back as if the pile belonged to Mercer now.
"Read them," Keston said. "All of them. Then ask me whatever you want."
Mercer read until the candle burned low. Elena wrote about small things at first. She asked whether Mercer still hated the taste of boiled cabbage. She asked whether he had grown taller than his father. She asked whether he still climbed onto the warehouse roof to watch the ships come in. Keston had answered every question, she wrote, in letters Mercer had never seen. She had kept every one of them.
The later letters grew shorter and more careful. In
