………….

Every year it’s the same thing.  They talk about that day. The same monologue. The same trite assumption, they don’t even come up with any alternate scenarios. Just the old, how can anyone disappear without a trace theory, which isn’t even a theory. Then they sit in the dusty chairs, that I might add, are dusty because this is the only time anyone ever comes to the house. Then they talk about what an odd girl she was. Into all those dark things, then they look over at the tree as if it’s evidence, confirmation of what they were saying.

Yet not in all those years that they had kept up the ritual of this visit did either of them think to open that pretty box under the tree…