Eleanor told me the whole story in a thin, steady voice. At twenty-nine she was a nurse, unmarried, and alone, and her family had insisted she give her baby daughter up for adoption. She signed the papers in a hospital corridor and walked home with empty arms. She had never told another soul. All her life she had wondered whether the child hated her, and every birthday in March she had baked a small cake and eaten it alone.

The rest of Claire’s letter was gentle. She wrote that her adoptive parents had been kind, that she had a good life, and that she only wanted to say thank you, and to know whether her mother was well. She wrote that if Eleanor did not want contact, she would understand and never write again. Because the letter had never arrived, Claire had taken the silence as an answer. She had spent thirty years believing she had been refused twice.

I could not leave it there. That evening I drove to Mercer Road, to the return address on the envelope, and knocked on the door of Apartment 3B. A young man answered and said no Claire lived there. But the building manager remembered the name. She had moved to Ohio years ago, and he still had a forwarding number in an old binder. I copied it down with my hand trembling, and I phoned from my car, and a warm voice answered on the second ring.

Claire drove to Pittsburgh the next morning, and I watched from my mail truck as she stepped onto the porch of 41 Linden Street, with a cake in her hands. The blue door opened. Neither woman spoke for a long time, and then they held each other on the step. Claire has visited every month since, and in March they bake the cake together. Eleanor has framed the thirty year old letter, with its twenty-nine cent stamp, and I deliver her mail with a smile.