When my brother Edwin's wife died in a car accident, he left her 3 children on my doorstep and disappeared without a trace: 15 years later I receive an envelope...
Fifteen years is long enough for absence to become part of the architecture of your life. You stop expecting the phone to ring with a certain voice on the other end, you stop scanning faces in a crowd with the background hope that one of them will turn into someone you recognize, you stop leaving small mental doors open that say he might come back. Eventually you close them, not out of bitterness, but out of the practical necessity of living in the present, not the conditional.
