Ilse had run the post office for thirty years and had the particular memory of someone who has handled other people's letters for that long: excellent for names, indifferent to dates.
She looked at the shipping form for a long time.
"That's Anton's hand," she said. "He wrote his sevens like gates."
Anton had kept the light before Maren. He had left the island in the spring without telling anyone where he was going, which on an island of two hundred people is the kind of thing that gets discussed for a decade.
"He was counting something," Ilse said. "He came in most mornings and bought one stamp. Every morning, one stamp, for about two years."
Maren did the arithmetic she did not want to do. Two years of mornings is roughly seven hundred stamps, and seven hundred letters is not a habit. It is a correspondence.