Every letter Wren has ever written was true, and none of them were mailed to the person they were about.

She writes letters for the dead — sits across a table from people who cannot say the thing, takes four sentences off them, and hands back a page that makes them put a hand over their mouth. It is good work. It is also an elegant place to stand where nobody can reach you. Now she is back in Marrow Cove for two weeks to sell her grandmother's incense shop, and the only thing standing between her and the Thursday bus is a woman two hundred yards down the street.

Sable runs the tea shop. She fetched the mail off that shop's box every morning for four years and read Wren's letters aloud to a dying woman who could no longer see. She has two hundred and fourteen of them in a cookie tin under her register, and she is not handing them over on schedule.

The town leaves letters for its dead on a stone shelf at the end of the harbor wall. Wren puts one there out of habit. In the morning there is writing on the back — and an old man in the corner of the tea shop explains the terms. The ledge only answers when the living have not finished saying what they need to say to each other. Every answer costs a piece of the voice. And one letter written to hold someone is the last letter that ever gets answered.

Eleven days. Two hundred yards. Eight words she has never once managed to say out loud.