My name is Harold. I’m sixty-eight and I’ve lived alone since my wife passed. Miso is a grey tabby who has never sat still for longer than a minute in her life.

On Sunday she jumped onto the kitchen counter, stared at the vent above the stove and did not move. Not for dinner. Not for her favorite treats. Not even when I rattled her bowl.

Monday, the same. Tuesday night I found her still sitting there, ears forward, tail flat, completely locked onto a small dark grille high in the wall.

I’m not a superstitious man. But I know Miso. I fetched a screwdriver and the step stool.

When I loosened the last screw and the cover swung open, something small and glinting slid down and dropped into my palm.

It was a brass key on a faded blue ribbon. Tied to the ribbon was a tiny paper tag with two words in my wife’s handwriting: ‘For Harold.’

Ruth had died six years earlier. I thought I had gone through every drawer in that house.

I sat down at the kitchen table with the key. Miso jumped into my lap for the first time that week and purred.

The key opened a small tin box in the garage rafters that I had never noticed, wrapped in an old scarf.

Inside were forty-two letters, one for each year we were married, and a note: ‘I knew you’d never read them while I was alive. Read one every night, and don’t skip ahead.’

I read the first one that night. In it she told me about the day she decided to marry me.

I have read one every night since. I’m on letter twenty-six. Miso sits in my lap every time and watches the ceiling, as if she is waiting for someone to come home.

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