The access room held four chairs along one wall and one table with good light. Ivel's desk was at the back, angled so she could see the door without being directly in line with it. Eighteen years of watching people cross that threshold had taught her what posture looked like when someone had already decided to open the letter and what it looked like when they were still deciding.
She processed four accesses before lunch. The first was a woman about forty who came in moving quickly and signed the intake form without sitting down first. She was done in eleven minutes. The second was a young man who sat with his letter for forty minutes and left without speaking. The third came with a friend; Ivel moved to the far corner of the room and kept her eyes on the intake log until she heard the paper fold. The fourth was a man who might have been seventy, unaccompanied.
She knew better than to read faces. She watched the middle distance and thought about the intake schedule for the following week. When she heard the paper fold she looked up. The man nodded to her and left.
She had a letter in the registry herself. Her father had deposited it twenty-two years ago, during the long difficulty between them, before they had worked out what to say to each other in person. He had died when she was thirty-five. There had been two good years before that: regular dinners, ordinary phone calls, one trip to the coast where they had walked along the water and he had told her something about his own father she had not known before. She had been thirty-three when they reconciled. The letter predated all of that by five years.
She did not know what it said. She did not know if what he had written in the bad years still applied, or if the reconciliation had made it obsolete, or if both things could be true. The letter was from a version of her father she had known and then moved past. She had worked in this room every day for eighteen years. She could have accessed the letter on any of those days.
She signed out at five. She passed the deposit archive on her way to the door and did not stop.