It came on an ordinary Sunday in the ninth year, and there was nothing about the day to distinguish it from any other.
Everything here is fine.
Four words, the same four that had arrived the previous three Sundays, in the same voice that had once written four paragraphs about a leaking garage roof and a neighbor's badly behaved dog.
Thomas read it, and saved his reply to the drafts folder — Drafts (147) — and went to bed.
The following Sunday nothing came.
He was, by that point, entirely accustomed to missed Sundays. He noted it, recorded it in the quire as he had recorded every one of the previous forty-odd, and got on with the week.
The Sunday after that, nothing came.
The third, nothing.
By the fifth he had stopped telling himself it was a gap, and by the eighth he had stopped checking on Sundays specifically, because he had begun checking several times a day and had recognized that as something he needed to stop doing before it consumed him entirely.
He told Victoria at the four-week mark, and she did not offer him hope, which he was grateful for.
"I'm not going to tell you it might resume," she said. "It might. It's done stranger things. I'd rather not build you a hope I can't stand behind."
"Thank you."
"I'd also point out," she said carefully, "that the number hasn't moved. It's been one for fourteen months. Whatever's stopped, it isn't that."
That was true, and Thomas had noticed it, and had not known what to make of it. The anchor sat at one, unchanged, week after week — the same reading it had shown when the letters were still arriving. Whatever relationship he had assumed existed between the falling number and his mother's voice was, evidently, not the relationship he had assumed.
At eight weeks he asked the relay directly, for the first time in years.
Has the connection failed.
The answer came faster than any answer ever had.
Connection intact. Source degraded beyond recoverable resolution.
Thomas sat with that for a very long time.
"It's not broken," he told Hamo the next day, the words copied out between them in the scriptorium. "That's what it's telling me. The line is open. There's simply nothing on the other end of it clear enough to send anything."
Hamo read the copied words twice.
"You are certain of the reading? Source degraded — not signal, not connection. Source."
"That's the word it used."
"Then I will say the thing I think you have already worked out and are waiting for someone else to say aloud." Hamo set the paper down gently. "The mechanism is telling you that your mother, as a person capable of writing a letter, no longer exists in a form the connection can reach. Not that she has died. That the version of her the deviation has left behind is no longer — resolved enough — to produce four words about the weather."
"Yes."
"I am sorry, Thomas."
"I know." Thomas found, somewhat to his surprise, that he was not crying, and that this was not because he was holding anything back. "I've been grieving this for three years. I thought the ending would be the grief and it turns out the ending is just the last piece of something I'd already mostly lost. There's less left to feel than I expected, and I don't know whether that's mercy or whether I've simply worn the place smooth."
"In my experience," Hamo said, "it is generally both, and the proportion is not knowable, and it does not matter as much as one fears at the time."
Thomas wrote his reply that Sunday anyway.
He wrote it the next Sunday too, and the one after that, and he was aware the entire time that he was writing into a silence that had been explained to him in unambiguous terms by a machine with no reason to lie.
He did it anyway, every Sunday, for the rest of his life.