The paper's dark edges seemed to prove that her father wrote it at work. Leda imagined him composing the apology between shifts. His employer's records, however, placed him on leave during the week named inside.
The marks came from the drawer where he stored the letter, beside a small piece of dark stone kept from the yard. A cleaner area beneath a folded corner showed that the staining happened after the paper was folded. It could not establish where the words were written.
Leda found a hotel receipt from the same week and a draft on the hotel's stationery. The apology had been written during a visit to her mother, then carried home unsent. Its history involved more hesitation and travel than the workbench scene she first imagined.
She kept the draft and the stained letter together. The physical marks still mattered, but they answered a question about storage rather than authorship. Reading them correctly did not supply the reply her mother never received. It allowed Leda to stop attributing a precise scene to evidence that had only ever shown where a sheet of paper spent its later years.