Grief, Temi was learning, did not arrive on schedule. It came on Tuesdays, mostly — though she could never say why Tuesdays, except that Tuesday was the day her mother used to call, and the absence of a sound is its own kind of noise.
At the office she answered emails with the wrong amount of warmth, oscillating between too brisk and too much, like a radio dial that couldn't find its station. Her colleagues had stopped asking how she was. She was grateful for this in a way she felt guilty about.
In the evenings she read the unsent letters one at a time, rationing them like something that might run out. Her mother's handwriting changed across the years — looser in the early ones, careful and small in the last — and Temi found herself dating each letter not by the year written at the top, but by the shape of the T.
She still had not opened the one with no name on it. It sat on her nightstand now, propped against the lamp, facing her every night like something waiting to be asked a question.