Small Acts
The Letters in the Wall

Fourteen Names

August 25, 2026 · Part 2 of 10 · 2 min

By Thursday the letters were laid out on a folding table in the site trailer like evidence at a crime scene, which, Dash was starting to think, half of them might be.

"Thirteen have full names," Odette said, tapping her pen against the list she'd made. "Corinne Aldous. Otto Attwater. Eleven more. All would've been kids here in the seventies. All old enough now to be somebody's grandparent."

"And the fourteenth." Gus nodded at the letter sitting apart from the others, the one with no signature.

"Just the S." Dash had read it maybe twenty times by now. Each time the line about the arm sat heavier. *He said it's our secret.*

"Could be nothing," Gus offered, though his voice didn't sound like he believed it. "Kid exaggerating. Kids do that."

"Kids don't usually write about keeping a secret from their mother because it'll hurt worse if they don't," Odette said.

Dash set the letter down. "We're not investigators. We're a construction crew that found some old mail."

"So what do we do? Bury it back in the wall?" Gus asked.

Nobody answered that.

Dash finally said what he'd been turning over since the demo. "We find them. All fourteen. We give people their own words back — the ones we can. And whoever wrote the S letter, if we can figure out who that is—"

"Then what?" Odette asked.

"Then we figure out the then when we get there."

It wasn't a plan so much as a direction, but it was enough to start with. Odette volunteered to photograph and scan every letter that night before they went back in the lockbox — "so nothing gets lost," she said, which struck Dash as sensible and, later, would strike him as the only reason any of them had proof of anything at all.

She was halfway through photographing the last letter — Otto Attwater's, full of a dog and a bicycle and nothing darker — when she stopped.

"Dash. There's a second one with no name."

She held it up. Different handwriting than the S letter — smaller, more careful, a girl's looping script. Only four lines.

*If you're reading this, ask my brother what happened to me. He'll say I ran away. I didn't run away. Ask about the back room.*

Continue the story Part 3: The Dog Named Biscuit →

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