The private places she’d hint at in her letters, the nuances of hope in a future he couldn’t quite surrender. Could you tell me, please, how he died? Linus was a good man who loved his town and his family. I will miss him. I lived, like you, on a farm in Iowa, although I regret that my family didn’t share the ties of yours. We too lived on dust and the taste of despair for too many dry years, but my father kept us in bacon and bread. It seemed, however, the dust parched him of any affection. Yes, I had a sister, Hedy. We would lie in bed at night, the one we shared in the sweltering attic of our home, and roll our fingers over my father’s discarded globe. We’d land on such countries as Italy or France or even Peru and conjure stories of places we longed to visit. Hedy and I traveled the world, around and back, before she left home at age seventeen. She died when I was ten years old. I love being a nurse. I thought it would unlock the world for me. Instead, it has been my salvation these past three years, in a prison I alone created.
