What the River Remembers

The harbor was quiet that morning, the kind of quiet that settles over a town before anyone has decided what the day will be.

She unlocked the shop, turned the sign, and set the kettle going in the back room. The books on the front table had shifted overnight the way books do — not really, of course, but enough that she straightened them anyway, one spine at a time.

It was in the third box from the estate sale that she found it: a letter, folded twice, slipped between pages one hundred and twelve and one hundred and thirteen of a novel no one had asked about in years. The envelope was addressed in a careful hand to a name she did not recognize.

"Not mine to open," she said aloud, to no one, and set it on the counter where she could see it.

By afternoon the rain had come in from the north, steady and patient. Customers came and went. The letter stayed exactly where she had left it, and somehow it seemed to take up more of the room each hour.

She told herself she would ask at the post office. She told herself it was probably nothing. Neither of those things, as it turned out, would be true.