A week later I go back to the apartment.

  The caretaker comes with me this time, just to the door, and then she steps back and lets me go in alone.

  I stand in the middle of the room.

  The afternoon light is the same as before. The glass still in the drying rack. The dead plant on the windowsill. The coat on the back of the door that I haven’t been able to make myself move.

  Lilia wanted to come. I told her not yet. I told her I needed to do this part first and she accepted it the way she accepts things, without pushing, with a quick squeeze of my hand at the door.

  I go to the desk.

  The letters are where I left them. I don’t read them again today. I just put my hand on the stack of them.

  She wrote these to me, I think. Every year. She wrote them and never sent them and kept them because they had nowhere else to go.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  I look at the room. The books in their particular order. The drawings pinned to the small board above the desk, people she knew probably, places she’d been.

  And on the wall, still there, the note.

  When mom comes back, I’ll tell her I’m sorry and then I’ll show her how much I miss and love her.

  I stand in front of it.

  I’m not going to take it down, I decide. Not yet. Maybe not ever. It stays where she put it.

  I whisper it. To the room. To the space where she was.

  “I remember.”

  Not an apology, though it carries one. Not a promise, because there’s no one left to keep it for. Just the only true thing left.

  I remember the weight of her when she was small. I remember the specific sound of her laugh and how it landed in my chest every time. I remember standing in her doorway the last morning, watching her sleep, her arms wide, her face completely trusting.

  I remember the birthday wish I heard over the candles that I never spoke aloud. I remember oh. I remember her walking away from my front step without looking back, composed, holding herself together with whatever she had left.

  I remember my daughter.

  I turn.

  I walk down the hallway and out the front door and the door closes behind me.

  The street is ordinary.

  I stand on the step for a moment with the afternoon around me.

  Then I go home.