My Wife Walked Out on Our Triplets for Another Man. Twenty-One Years Later, Three Velvet Boxes Arrived — But the Envelope Wasn't Meant for Them
Chapter 1: The Magnet on the Fridge
The magnet was shaped like a little red lighthouse. It said LANTERMAN PIER in chipped white letters, and it had come from the only vacation Corinne and I ever took together, the summer before the girls were born.
On a gray Tuesday in March, twenty-one years ago, that lighthouse was holding down a sheet of notebook paper when I walked into the kitchen with three bottles warming in a pot.
"Forgive me. Rory makes me feel awake again. You'll be fine. You always are."
That was it. No signature. She didn't think she needed one.
I read it four times while the bottles rattled in the boiling water. Upstairs, Nora started crying first, the way she always did, and then Reese joined her, louder, angrier. Junie was silent. Junie was always silent, and that scared me more than the other two put together.
You'll be fine.
I was twenty-six years old. I drove a delivery route for a plumbing supply company in Fallon Ridge. I knew how to change a tire and fix a garbage disposal. I did not know how to keep three six-month-old girls alive at once.
That first winter, all three caught the same fever in the same week. I remember sitting on the bathroom floor at two in the morning with Reese on my chest, Nora in the bouncer, and Junie in the crook of my knees, all of us steaming under the hot shower so their little lungs could open up. I remember saying out loud, to nobody, "I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine," like it was a prayer.
I learned to French braid at five in the morning from online videos, practicing on a thrift-store doll named Mrs. Buttons before the girls woke up. By kindergarten, I could do three heads of hair in eleven minutes flat.
I learned to sew because the school wanted costumes and I couldn't afford to buy three of everything. Every spring there was a play, and every spring my kitchen table disappeared under felt and safety pins. Three sunflowers. Three snowflakes. Three very lopsided penguins.
And every year, Pinecrest Elementary held a Mother-Daughter Breakfast in the cafeteria. The first year, I planned to keep them home. The girls staged a sit-in on the living room rug.
"You're coming," Reese announced. She was six. "You do the mom stuff. So you're the mom."
So I went. Every year. One tall man in a sea of mothers, three little girls hanging off his arms, eating powdered eggs and pretending it was the finest meal in the county.
The lighthouse magnet stayed on the fridge. I never could explain why. Maybe I needed the reminder. Maybe I was too tired to take it down. By the time the girls were old enough to ask about it, it was holding up report cards, then prom pictures, then three college acceptance letters.
Nora grew up fierce and organized, the one who kept a color-coded calendar for the whole house. Reese grew up loud and funny and protective, the kind who'd start an argument with a stranger for cutting in line in front of an old man. Junie grew up quiet and watchful, the one who noticed everything and said a fraction of it.
None of them could remember their mother's voice.
Twenty-one years, and Corinne never called. Never sent a birthday card. Never mailed so much as a postcard from wherever Rory had taken her.
Then came last Saturday.
The backyard looked like a fairy tale. Nora had strung lights through the oak branches in perfect zigzags. Reese had insisted on a taco truck. Junie had quietly arranged mason jars of wildflowers on every table. There were three cakes on the folding table, lemon, chocolate, and strawberry, because the girls had refused to share one since their first birthday.
About forty people filled the yard. Neighbors. Old teachers. My sister Peg and her husband. The girls' friends from college.
At exactly six o'clock, a white van stopped at the curb.
A young man in a courier vest came up the driveway carrying three boxes stacked on his forearms.
"Delivery for Nora, Reese, and Junie Kimball?"
They were deep navy velvet, each tied with a silver ribbon. When he set them on the gift table, the table creaked.
On top sat a cream envelope.
"READ FIRST. Before you open anything."
I knew those looping capital letters. I'd seen them on grocery lists, on a lease agreement, on a sheet of paper under a red lighthouse.
My chest went tight before my mind caught up.
The girls stopped laughing. Then, one by one, so did everyone else.
Nora picked up the envelope and looked at me.
"Dad... is this..."
"Yes," I said. "It's from your mother."
Reese folded her arms.
"Then we're not reading it. Throw it out."
But Junie slipped it from Nora's fingers and slid one finger under the seal.
Then she went still.
"Dad," she whispered. "It isn't addressed to us."
She held it up.
Beneath READ FIRST, in that same hand, were four words.
"For their father."
Chapter 2: Four Words
I didn't open it in front of forty people.
I said, "Give me a minute," in a voice that sounded almost normal, and I carried the envelope into the kitchen like it might go off in my hands.
Through the window over the sink, I could see the yard. Nobody had sat back down. Peg had a hand on Reese's shoulder. Nora was standing in front of the gift table like a bouncer. Junie was watching the kitchen window, watching me.
The red lighthouse was still on the fridge, holding up a photo of the girls in their high school caps and gowns.
I slid my thumb under the flap. Three pages, folded in thirds, heavy paper with a gold monogram at the top. CA.
"Russ,
I know this is the last thing you expected, and I know you're angry. You're allowed to be. But please read all of it before you decide anything.
Rory didn't last. You probably guessed that. He was gone within the year. I won't bore you with the rest except to say that life eventually got much, much better. I married Grant Ashby eleven years ago. You may know the name. The Ashby Foundation. The children's wing at Bellmont General.
Grant and I were never able to have children of our own. He believes deeply in family. It's the cornerstone of everything he's built.
The girls are twenty-one now. They are adults, and I'm finally in a position to give them what they deserve.
Inside each box is a key to a furnished apartment in the Ashby residences, a cashier's check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and something personal from me.
But there is one condition. If they open the boxes, they accept it.
On Sunday the 14th, the Ashby Foundation holds its annual Mothers and Daughters Brunch at the Sterling Arbor Hotel. Grant will be announcing a new scholarship in their honor. The Ashby Daughters Fund. I need them there, at my table, as my daughters. They'll be added to the family registry under the Ashby name.
And Russ, you can't come. I think you understand why.
I won't pretend I was a good mother. But you have to admit they deserve more than what you could give them. You did your best. You always do. But your best was a rented house and student loans and a dad who sewed their clothes.
You were fine. I'm offering them better than fine.
Let them choose. Don't you dare choose for them.
Corinne"
I read the last page twice. Then I set the letter flat on the counter and pressed both palms against it, as if it might lift off.
Your best was a rented house and student loans.
She wasn't wrong about the loans. That was the part that made my stomach turn. Reese had been accepted to the veterinary program at Calloway State in the spring, and I had sat at this exact counter at midnight with a calculator and a second mortgage application, running numbers that never came out right. I'd told her we'd figure it out. I'd told her that the way I'd told the girls a hundred things. We'll figure it out. We'll be fine.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Each.
I thought about the night Nora was nine and needed glasses and I sold my fishing boat to pay for them. I thought about Junie's braces, paid off in eighteen installments. I thought about every single "no" I'd ever had to say and watch land on their faces.
Corinne had picked the softest place in me and pressed her thumb into it. She'd always been good at that.
And then there was the line about the brunch. Mothers and Daughters. My jaw locked so hard my teeth ached.
I could burn it. I could tell the girls it was nothing, an apology card, a sad attempt. I could carry the boxes back out to the curb and never mention the money, and they would never know what I had kept from them.
And I would know. Every time Reese looked at a tuition bill, I would know.
Don't you dare choose for them.
I hated that she was right about that, too.
The screen door creaked. Junie stood in the doorway in her yellow sundress, the same shade as the sunflower costume I'd sewn for her in first grade.
"Dad?"
"Yeah, baby."
"You've been in here eleven minutes." She paused. "That's how long it took you to do our hair."
I laughed, and it came out wet.
She crossed the kitchen and looked at the letter without touching it. Then at my face.
"It's bad," she said.
"It's complicated."
"Those are the same thing when you say it."
Outside, Reese had started pacing. Nora was holding all three boxes now, as if guarding them.
I folded the letter, tucked it into my shirt pocket, and walked back out into the string lights. Forty faces turned toward me.
Nora stepped forward.
"What does she want, Dad?"
I looked at my three daughters, at the cakes they wouldn't share, at the boxes Nora was clutching.
"She wants to buy you back," I said. "And she's put a price on it."
Chapter 3: Three Unopened Boxes
I meant to wait until the guests went home.
Reese had other plans.
"Read it," she said. "Right here. Out loud."
"Reese, honey, there are forty people..."
"Good." She lifted her chin, the same way she had at six years old on the living room rug. "Everybody here showed up for us. Every single one. She didn't. I'm not hiding her letter like it's something to be ashamed of. We didn't do anything wrong."
Peg let out a low whistle. Somebody near the taco truck murmured, "That's right."
I looked at Nora. She nodded once. I looked at Junie. She was already watching me, waiting.
So I took the letter out of my pocket and read it under the string lights.
I read the part about Rory leaving. Somebody snorted. I read the part about Grant Ashby, and I heard a few people mutter the name, because everybody in Fallon Ridge had driven past that children's wing. I read the part about the apartments and the cashier's checks, and a sound went through the yard, half gasp, half groan.
Then I read the condition.
"Ashby name," Reese repeated flatly. "Family registry. Like we're cattle."
And then I got to the part about me.
My voice gave out halfway through "a dad who sewed their clothes." I cleared my throat and kept going, because if I stopped I'd never start again.
"You were fine. I'm offering them better than fine."
When I folded the pages, the only sound was a cicada somewhere in the oak.
Mrs. Delacroix, the girls' old second-grade teacher, was the first to speak. She was eighty-one and had come with a cane.
"I taught those girls," she said, to nobody and everybody. "Their father was at every conference. Every single one. That woman has some nerve."
"Somebody get me that address," Peg growled. "I've got opinions."
Nora set the three boxes gently on the table like they were made of glass.
"Okay," she said, in her planning voice, the one she used for group projects and road trips. "Let's be smart. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars is real. Reese, that's vet school. That's your whole degree, no loans."
Reese whirled on her.
"Are you serious right now?"
"I'm being honest! Dad's been looking at second mortgages. Don't act like you didn't see the papers on the counter."
The air went out of me. I hadn't known they'd seen.
Reese turned to me, and something in her face crumpled.
"Dad. Is that true?"
"It doesn't matter," I said.
"It matters to me."
Junie hadn't said anything. She was sitting on the edge of the picnic bench, turning her own box slowly in her hands, running a thumb along the silver ribbon without pulling it.
"She said we have to choose," Junie said quietly. "Not you."
"That's right," I said. "It's your choice. All three of you. I won't stand in the way of whatever you decide."
"That's not what I asked." Junie looked up. "What do you want?"
Forty people waited for my answer.
I thought about the bathroom floor and the hot shower and the three of them breathing against me. I thought about the second mortgage. I thought about the Mothers and Daughters Brunch, and the table I wouldn't be allowed to sit at.
"I want you to never have to wonder," I said. "If you say no, I don't want you lying awake at forty wondering what that money could've done. And if you say yes, I don't want you to feel like you betrayed me. You couldn't. Not ever."
Reese's eyes filled.
"That's such a dad answer."
"I am a dad."
That got a laugh from the yard, a wobbly one.
Nora rubbed her forehead.
"Let's not decide tonight. Nobody opens anything. We sleep on it."
The guests began, slowly, to drift toward the cakes again. Somebody restarted the music. But nobody's heart was in it.
As I gathered paper plates, Junie came up beside me with the envelope.
"Dad. Look at the postmark."
I squinted. Fallon Ridge. Postmarked yesterday.
"She mailed it from here?"
"Not just here." Junie lifted her eyes toward the street.
A black sedan was idling across the road, under the streetlight, engine running, headlights off. It had been there, I realized, since before the courier arrived.
The driver's door opened.
A woman stepped out in a cream coat, smoothed her hair with one hand, and started walking toward our gate.
Chapter 4: The Woman Across the Street
I'd imagined this moment a thousand times over twenty-one years. In the version I'd rehearsed, I always had something devastating to say.
In real life, I just stood there holding a stack of paper plates.
Corinne looked expensive. That was my first thought, and I hated myself for it. Her hair was a careful shade of honey that cost money every six weeks. Her coat was the kind that didn't wrinkle. There were diamonds at her ears, small and serious.
She stopped at the gate and let her eyes travel across the yard. The string lights. The taco truck. The three cakes. The forty people who had gone silent all over again.
Then she found the girls.
For a second, just one, something cracked across her face. I saw it. It was gone before anyone else did.
"Look at you," she said. "Oh, look at you three."
None of them moved.
"I couldn't wait in the car anymore," Corinne said, lifting the latch and stepping through as if she'd been invited. "I needed to see you. In person. After all these years."
"You saw us," Reese said. "Bye."
Corinne laughed lightly, the way you laugh at a toddler's tantrum.
"You must be Reese. You have my temper." She turned. "And Nora, the organizer. And you..." Her gaze settled on Junie. "You were always the quiet one. Even as a baby."
"You don't know that," Junie said. "You weren't here long enough to know that."
A murmur rippled down the picnic tables.
Corinne's smile tightened by one degree.
"I understand you're upset. I'd be upset too. But I want you to hear my side, since I'm sure you've only ever heard his." Her eyes flicked to me, then away, like I was furniture. "I was twenty-four. I was drowning. Three babies, no help, no money, a husband who thought a plumbing route was a future. I made a terrible choice. But I tried to make it right. I called. For years, I called."
My hands tightened on the paper plates until they bent.
"That's not true," I said.
"Russ, please. Not in front of the girls."
"The phone," Junie said.
Everyone looked at her.
"The house phone." She pointed toward the kitchen. "Same number since before we were born. Dad never changed it. He never got it disconnected, even when everybody else got rid of their landlines. He said..." Her voice wavered. "He said in case anyone ever needed to find us."
I hadn't known she understood that. I'd never told her the whole reason.
Corinne's lips parted. Then closed.
"Line must have been bad," she said.
Peg made a noise like a teakettle.
Corinne straightened her coat and refocused on Reese.
"Let's talk about the future instead. I hear you got into Calloway State's veterinary program. That's wonderful, sweetheart. It's also eighty thousand dollars a year." She tilted her head toward me with something almost like pity. "Your father's a good man. But good men don't pay tuition. I can."
Reese's face went red. I watched the words land exactly where Corinne aimed them, right in the middle of everything my daughter loved.
"The brunch is next Sunday," Corinne went on, warmer now, closing in. "It's a lovely event. Mothers and daughters from all over the county. Grant's announcing the scholarship fund in your names. Photographers, donors, a little speech. And then you'll have the apartments, the money, your futures. All you have to do is open the boxes and sit at my table."
"And Dad can't come," Nora said.
"It's a mothers and daughters brunch, darling."
"We've gone to one every year," Nora said. "With him. He's the only one who ever showed up."
Corinne blinked, just once.
Reese stepped forward slowly. Her voice was very quiet, which with Reese was always worse than loud.
"Why do you need us there so badly?"
"Because you're my daughters."
"You've had daughters for twenty-one years. You never needed us before." Reese narrowed her eyes. "What did you tell them? Grant. The donors. What did you tell them about us?"
The cicada had stopped. The music had stopped. Forty people leaned forward.
Corinne lifted her chin, and for the first time, the polish slipped enough to show what was underneath.
"I told them the truth as I needed it to be," she said. "I told them your father took you from me."
Chapter 5: The Only Father in the Room
Corinne left the way she'd come, heels clicking down the driveway, coat unwrinkled, as if she hadn't just set a match to my whole life in my own backyard.
The guests left soon after, one by one, each of them squeezing my arm or the girls' shoulders on the way out. Mrs. Delacroix kissed my cheek and whispered, "Every conference, Russell. I remember."
By midnight it was just the four of us at the kitchen table, three velvet boxes lined up in the middle like a jury.
Nobody touched them.
"I need to say something," Reese said, staring at the wood grain. "And I need you not to talk until I'm done."
I nodded.
"I wanted the money." Her voice cracked. "For like ten seconds, when she said eighty thousand a year, I wanted it so bad I could taste it. And I hate that. I hate that she knew that's where to push."
"She's always known where to push," I said quietly. "It's her only talent."
"You talked," Reese said.
"Sorry."
Nora reached over and took her hand.
"It's okay to want it, Reese. It's a lot of money. I thought about it too."
Junie had pulled her knees up onto the chair. Her hair had come loose from her party braid, and without a word, she scooted her chair over next to mine and turned her back to me.
I knew exactly what she was asking for.
I took the elastic off her wrist and started again from the crown, the way Mrs. Buttons had taught me at five in the morning a lifetime ago. Over, under, over. Her sisters watched without saying a thing.
"She said you took us," Junie said, while my fingers worked. "To all those people. For years."
"I know."
"So if we sit at her table on Sunday, we're saying it's true."
My hands stopped for a second. Then kept going.
"Yes," I said. "I think that's what it would mean."
Junie was quiet for a long time.
"Then we're going," she said.
My heart dropped straight through the floor.
"But not the way she wants," Junie finished.
I tied off the braid. She turned around, and for the first time all night, my quiet daughter smiled.
Sunday came gray and cold.
The Sterling Arbor Hotel looked like a wedding cake turned into a building. In the grand ballroom, there were round tables draped in blush linen, floral centerpieces taller than children, and a banner across the front stage: THE ASHBY FOUNDATION MOTHERS & DAUGHTERS BRUNCH. A photographer was circling. A string quartet played something soft in the corner.
Two hundred women in pastel dresses turned their heads when we walked in.
Because I walked in with them.
I'd worn my only suit, the gray one from Nora's graduation. Reese had ironed my tie twice. The girls had dressed in navy, all three of them, the exact shade of the velvet boxes each one carried tucked under her arm.
The ribbons were still tied. Not one of them had been opened.
At the front of the room, at a table marked FAMILY, Corinne rose from her chair. She wore pale pink silk and a frozen smile. Beside her stood a tall, silver-haired man with kind, tired eyes. Grant Ashby.
"Girls!" Corinne called brightly, gliding toward us. Her eyes slid to me, and the brightness dimmed. Under her breath, through her teeth: "What is he doing here?"
"He's our date," Reese said. "Same as every year."
A woman at the nearest table leaned to her friend. "Is that the father? The one who..."
"Shh."
Corinne recovered fast. She always did.
"Well. Come sit, come sit. Grant's about to make the announcement." She lowered her voice. "Russ can wait in the lobby."
"No," Nora said pleasantly. "He can't."
Before Corinne could answer, Grant Ashby stepped up to the microphone, tapped it twice, and smiled out over the room.
"Good morning, everyone. This year is very special to my wife and me. Because today, for the first time, her daughters are joining us."
Corinne turned, beaming, and spread her arms toward the girls.
Reese walked past her outstretched hands and up the three steps to the stage.
She set her velvet box down on the podium, right in front of Grant Ashby.
Then she leaned toward the microphone.
"Actually," she said. "We came to give these back."
Chapter 6: What the Boxes Held
The string quartet stopped mid-phrase. One violin squeaked out a last confused note.
Nora climbed the steps and set her box beside Reese's. Junie followed, last and slowest, and placed hers at the end of the row. Three navy boxes, three silver ribbons, untouched.
Grant Ashby looked down at them, then at Corinne, then out at the room. He was a man who had spoken at a hundred podiums, and for the first time in a long while, I think he had no idea what to say.
"Corinne?" he asked.
She was already moving, fast, pink silk swishing as she climbed the stairs. Her smile was still on, but it had the stiffness of something held up with pins.
"Girls, sweetheart, this isn't the time..."
"It's exactly the time," Reese said into the mic. "You told everybody in this room a story. We thought they should hear the rest of it."
"Grant," Corinne said, laughing too lightly, "they're emotional. Their father has filled their heads with..."
"Our father," Nora cut in, "is standing right there."
Two hundred heads turned toward me. I stood at the back by the ballroom doors in my graduation suit, with my hands at my sides because I didn't know what else to do with them.
I had never felt so seen, or so naked, in my whole life.
Junie stepped up to the microphone. My quiet one. Her hands were shaking, and she held a folded sheet of notebook paper, yellowed and soft at the creases.
My breath caught. I knew that paper.
I'd kept it in the junk drawer under the takeout menus for twenty-one years. I'd never shown it to anyone.
"I found this when I was twelve," Junie said. Her voice was small, but the microphone carried it to every corner. "I was looking for batteries. I never told Dad I found it. I put it back exactly where it was." She unfolded it. "It was stuck to our refrigerator under a lighthouse magnet the day she left. We were six months old."
She read it aloud, slow and clear.
"Forgive me. Rory makes me feel awake again. You'll be fine. You always are."
A sound moved through the ballroom, a long, collective exhale, like the whole room had been punched at once.
Grant Ashby's face changed. I watched it happen. The kindness didn't leave it. Something just went out behind it, like a light in a window.
"Rory," he said slowly. "You told me you were left. You told me he took the girls and moved away and blocked every attempt you made."
"Grant, it's complicated..."
"The house phone never changed," Junie went on, softly. "He kept it connected for twenty-one years in case she called. She didn't."
Corinne's composure finally broke. She snatched the nearest box off the podium and tore the ribbon loose.
"Fine! You want them to see what they're throwing away?" She flipped the lid open and turned it toward the crowd. "Look!"
Inside, nested in navy satin, sat a heavy brass key on an Ashby keychain, a folded cashier's check, and a gold locket on a chain.
Corinne pried the locket open with a trembling thumbnail and held it up as proof of her love.
It held one photograph.
Of Corinne.
Not the girls. Not a baby picture. Just her own face, smiling, professionally lit.
Somebody at the front table actually laughed. Then, mortified, stopped.
Reese stared at the locket for a long time.
"You didn't even put us in it," she said.
Corinne looked at the photograph as if she'd never seen it before. Her mouth worked, but nothing came out.
Grant reached over and gently took the box from her hands. He closed the lid.
"I'm sorry," he said, not to Corinne, but to the girls. Then he turned and looked straight down the long ballroom at me. "Mr. Kimball. I owe you an apology I don't know how to make. I believed what I was told. I should have asked more questions."
I nodded. It was all I could manage.
Grant leaned toward the microphone.
"The Ashby Daughters Fund," he said, "will not be announced today."
He set the three boxes in a neat row, stepped off the stage, and walked out a side door without looking back at his wife.
Corinne stood alone at the podium in pink silk while two hundred women looked at her and said nothing. The photographer lowered his camera.
The girls came down the steps and walked the whole length of the ballroom to where I stood. Reese got there first. She took my left arm. Nora took my right. Junie slipped in under my chin like she used to when she was small.
"Come on, Dad," Reese said. "We're going to a real breakfast."
As we pushed through the doors, I heard Corinne's voice behind us, thin and cracking.
"Junie. Junie, please. You were always the quiet one."
Junie stopped. Turned.
"I was," she said. "And I was listening the whole time."
Epilogue
The Ashby Foundation's board announced in January that Corinne Ashby had stepped down from all charitable roles "for personal reasons." The local paper ran two paragraphs on it, buried below a story about a pothole. By spring, the Sterling Arbor brunch had quietly gotten a new name. People in Fallon Ridge stopped mentioning Corinne at all, which, I suspect, was the one punishment she couldn't stand.
She sent one more letter, in March. It wasn't addressed to me this time, and it didn't come with boxes. The girls read it together on the back steps. Whatever was in it, they decided it was theirs to keep, and I let it be. Not every door needs to close with a slam. Some of them just stay shut.
We didn't take a dime of Ashby money.
Reese started at Calloway State in the fall anyway. Her sisters had spent the winter applying for every scholarship in three counties on her behalf, Nora running it like a military campaign. Reese won two of them. She also picked up weekend shifts at an animal clinic and told me, every single time I tried to talk about the second mortgage, "Dad, stop. We're figuring it out."
We. That word does something to me every time.
Nora took a job at the county planning office, where she color-codes things for a living and is extremely happy. Junie is studying to be a speech therapist. She says she wants to help kids who have a lot to say and don't know how to get it out yet.
On the girls' twenty-second birthday, there were three cakes again. Lemon, chocolate, strawberry. Nobody shared.
After the guests left, Junie handed me a small flat package wrapped in brown paper.
"From all three of us," Nora said.
Inside was a new magnet. Hand-painted, a little clumsy, clearly made by someone at the kitchen table with a cheap brush and a lot of love. It was shaped like a sunflower, a snowflake, and a penguin all squeezed together into one strange, wonderful blob.
"Take the lighthouse down, Dad," Reese said softly. "You don't need it anymore."
I looked at the red lighthouse, chipped and faded, still holding up a photo of three girls in caps and gowns. I thought about the gray Tuesday and the boiling bottles and the note that told me I'd be fine.
I took it down. I dropped it in the junk drawer, under the takeout menus, where the old note used to live.
Then I put up the new magnet, and under it, a fresh sheet of notebook paper the girls had written on together, in three different handwritings:
May you like
"You weren't just fine, Dad. You were everything. Love, your daughters."
It's still there. I read it every morning while the coffee brews, at five a.m., the hour I once spent learning how to braid.
