It is 1973. Hilde is 28. She and Mette are at the family table after dinner, and they are talking about the lake road settlement.
The settlement is a dispute between two families over a parcel of land near the lake road, going back before Hilde was born. Mette has been following it. She says the Eriksen claim will hold because there are old rights-of-passage agreements that haven't been formally entered into the record. Hilde says this is wrong: the survey maps clearly show the Carlsen boundary, registered in 1962. She says it with confidence, and she says it in a way that makes Mette's position sound like wishful thinking.
Mette is quiet for a moment. Then she changes the subject.
Three days later, sorting through papers for an unrelated reason, Hilde finds the 1954 land grants. The rights-of-passage agreements are exactly as Mette described them. The survey maps Hilde had cited were from 1962, after the settlement. The Eriksen claim would hold. Mette had been right.
That evening Hilde wrote a letter to Mette. She got to the second sentence, the sentence where she needed to name what she had done, and she could not find the right word. Wrong was too small for it. Unkind was too large. The word she needed was somewhere between the two and she could not locate it. She set the letter aside.
She set it aside for thirteen years.
Mette died in April 1986, from something sudden that gave no warning. The letter was never finished, never sent. In the box where Hilde kept correspondence, the two-sentence letter remained in its envelope without an address.
In the last year of her own life, Hilde was sitting with her granddaughter on the back porch when the conversation turned to the family, to old arguments, to people who had been certain about things. She said: "Your great-aunt Mette was usually right about things." She paused, not sure what she was about to add. Her granddaughter waited.
Hilde said nothing else.