Margaret had nearly completed her morning rituals—feeding the terrier, Buster, who patrolled the garden with a snarl—when the creature suddenly bristled at the gate. The boy, like all dogs, despised the postman. And there he was, cycling furiously, a neon envelope flung at Margaret’s feet before vanishing around the corner as if chased by shadows.
She held the paper with wary hands; such tangible letters were relics now. *”Things were simpler once,”* she mused, and the past unfurled in kaleidoscopic fragments: schoolgirl self clutching a rusted postal box key, her youthful breath fogging the glass as she waited for notes from friends, love letters from distant cousins in Australia, or the glossy pages of *The Lady* magazine.
Then came the hunger for escape. She’d huddled with her parents, ink-stained fingers tracing visa documents, their hope a flickering candle in the dark. Later, in a cramped hostel in Leeds, she’d paced the corridors, each postbox a totem of dread—exams, bills, the sterile hum of progress devouring the handwritten.
The envelope was silk-soft, a crest embossed in gold. Inside: an invitation to her cousin Emily’s coming-of-age celebration in Manchester. *”How long has it been?”* Margaret wandered, her shadow stretching in the quiet. She remembered Bristol, where Emily’s mother had been a flame-haired rebel, once nearly eloping with a sailor. *”Wasn’t she worried about spinsterhood?”* Margaret chuckled. *”No, just boredom,”* she’d said, and the memory dissolved like sugar in tea.
Emily’s sister’s wedding had been a legend—a village fair with three-tiered cakes, herring in cream sauce, and a fiddle playing until dawn. Margaret had returned from her student years to find the world smaller, her own face creased where once it had been smooth. She was a grandmother now, though her mind still wore the silken dress of youth.
Her parents had been the boldest in the brood, fleeing a rainy Yorkshire hamlet for London’s clamor. The old flat had been a hub for aunts and uncles—some like the lace-clad seamstress from Dundee who carried a cairn terrier in her tartan shawl, others like cousin Harold, who’d once smuggled a kilt-vest hybrid and never stopped arguing about it.
There had been the fabled visits: the spinster aunt from Glasgow who arrived with a parrot that shrieked lullabies, the uncle from Cardiff who built a crooked bookshelf that still teetered in the hall, and the Bartlett cousins—quiet, practical souls who mended the roof without asking. Margaret had adored the chaos, the scent of pork pies and rosemary, the hum of Scottish lullabies interlacing with London rain.
But time, relentless and kind, had thinned their numbers. The DNA test had unearthed more ghosts—first cousins twice removed in Shropshire, distant kin in New Zealand. Margaret had dreamed of heirlooms, a forgotten fortune tucked in a teacup, but the truth was starker: some threads frayed better left alone.
The flight to Manchester would cost a small fortune in pounds. Summer there was a furnace, and what would she say? *”How odd to find strangers in a mirror.”* She’d reply with a gift—a vintage brooch, the card sealed with lavender wax—and let the past remain a ghost on the threshold.
Buster barked, dragging her from thought. Margaret slipped inside, the door shutting softly between worlds.