By the time Elena reached the apartment, the rain had erased the city beyond the glass. There was only the room, her mother’s chair, and the pale square on the wall where a photograph had been.

She set the keys in the blue dish by the door. The dish had survived three apartments and a fall from the fire escape, though a thin crack now divided it neatly in two. Her mother had called that crack a river. Everything broken becomes a map if you look at it long enough, she used to say.

Elena opened the window an inch. The air smelled of wet pavement and the bakery downstairs. Somewhere below, a delivery bike dragged its chain through a puddle. She listened until the sound turned the corner.

“Everything broken becomes a map if you look at it long enough.”

The letters were waiting in a kitchen drawer, tied with the green ribbon from a Christmas box. She had known about them since Tuesday and avoided them until Friday. There were eleven, each addressed in the same patient hand, each stamped and never sent.

She took the first one to the diner on Atlantic, where the waitress did not ask whether someone would be joining her. Elena ordered two coffees anyway.

The first letter began without a greeting. I have been trying to tell you about the summer before you were born. Elena read the sentence twice. Outside, a bus knelt at the curb and rose again. The second coffee made a small dark moon in its cup.

She read until the windows turned to mirrors. Her mother appeared there only as an absence beside her, a shape the glass seemed willing to hold.

When Elena finished, she retied the ribbon and walked home in the rain. She left the blue dish where it was. She left the empty square on the wall. But before bed, she moved the chair closer to the window, as if someone had asked for a better view.