It took her three nights to read them all, working through the stack under the single bulb in the room that still smelled faintly of her grandmother's shea butter and camphor. The letters spanned four years, 1968 to 1972, written in the careful, looping script of a man who had clearly practised his English in a mission school and was proud of every sentence.
Kwame wrote about the cocoa harvest, about a radio he was saving to buy, about a song he'd heard on a lorry that he couldn't get out of his head. He wrote about Efua's laugh, which he said he could still hear "three towns away." And running through every letter, quietly, was a question he never asked outright but that Abena could feel pressing against the paper: when will you tell them about us.
The last letter was different. Shorter. The handwriting less careful, as though written in a hurry, or with a hand that wouldn't quite hold steady.
*I understand,* it said. *Your father has made his wishes known, and I will not be the reason a daughter loses her family. I will not write again. Only know that I have not, and will not, stop carrying you.*
There was no letter after that. Abena checked the box twice to be sure.
She thought of her grandfather, Opoku, dead nine years now, whom she had loved without complication her whole life — the man who taught her to fish and who cried, unashamed, at every one of her graduations. She did not know, yet, what to do with the fact that he had a whole life she'd never questioned, built, it now seemed, on the ruins of one her grandmother had been made to give up.
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