Jubilee July sat on the porch steps of the house where she grew up, holding a letter the post office had sent back to her for the third time. The envelope was bent at one corner. A purple stamp across the front read RETURN TO SENDER. Below it, someone had scribbled NO FORWARDING ADDRESS in blue pen. Inside that envelope was an invitation to meet under the old maple tree on Canada Day, the way she and her four childhood friends had done every summer until the last one. Three months of searching had brought her this far. She had combed through old Christmas cards from her mother's tin. She had called a cousin who seemed to know everyone. She had found four addresses, written four notes, and tucked each one beside the treat that friend loved most as a child: butter tarts, lemonade, peppermints, ginger cookies. The man's note she had written four times before sealing it. All four drafts were still folded in the front pocket of her woven satchel, in case she lost her nerve and needed to start again. Beside her on the step sat the stack the mail carrier had returned that morning. Every envelope she had sent was there. Forwarding labels covered the addresses. Stamps from two provinces marked the corners. Edges were soft from handling. Not one had been opened. She had thought the hard part was finding them. She understood now that the addresses she had found were already old. She walked to the corner where the maple tree stood. The trunk was wider than she remembered. The crown was full and green, and a squirrel watched her from a low branch. A bird's nest sat tucked in the fork above. No initials were carved into the bark anymore. The grass beneath was uncut. A rope swing she had forgotten about hung from one limb, the seat split down the middle. She stood under it and counted on her fingers. Four friends. Four wrong addresses. Twenty-three days until Canada Day. She crossed two streets to the old ice cream parlor where they used to meet before walking to the tree. The mint and pink awning was faded but the lights were on. Behind the counter stood a woman who had scooped cones for them as kids. Jubilee set the returned stack on the counter and asked if she still kept the birthday book, the one where every neighborhood child wrote their name and the names of their parents. The woman wiped her hands on her apron and reached under the register. She placed a thick ledger between them. Jubilee opened it to the year of the last gathering and began copying down parents' names. The addresses on her envelopes were dead. The parents, she hoped, were not.

Jubilee kept copying names from the leather ledger until the woman behind the counter laid a hand on the page. The woman said one family had asked, years back, never to be contacted again. She turned the ledger toward Jubilee and pointed to a line near the bottom. The name was Gilder. Beside it, in different ink, someone had written DO NOT WRITE. Jubilee stared at the entry. One of her four friends had been a Gilder. She closed the ledger and thanked the woman and stepped out onto the sidewalk with the address copied on the back of her hand. She walked the six blocks slowly. The house sat behind a tall iron fence wrapped with wire. Boards covered the downstairs windows. The porch steps were swept clean, but the front door was nailed shut. A weathered wooden sign hung crooked from the gate, GILDER RESIDENCE in faded paint, spider webs strung between the letters. Through a gap in the boards she saw a curtain move. Someone was inside. Someone had heard her stop. Jubilee took the four folded drafts from the front pocket of her satchel. She had written and rewritten his note for a reason. She had drifted from him worse than from any of the others. She unfolded the cleanest copy and read it once through. Then she folded it again and slid it back into the satchel. She took out a blank card instead and wrote three lines: the date, the maple tree, and her phone number. She signed it with her first name only. She did not mention the others. She did not ask for a reply. She slipped the card through the slot in the gate and watched it land on the walk inside. She waited a full minute. The curtain did not move again. She turned and walked back toward the parlor, three names still to copy and twenty-two days left. The family had asked not to be contacted, and she had contacted them anyway. She had chosen. Now the choice belonged to whoever picked the card up off the stones.

Jubilee sat on the bench outside the parlor with the ledger open on her knees. She had copied two more names since leaving the Gilder gate. Her phone lay face up on the wood beside her. The screen stayed dark. She had checked it after every name, and now she was checking it between letters. Twenty-two days left, and she was losing the morning to a slab of black glass. She picked up the phone and turned it over in her hand. The case was warm from her palm. No missed calls. No messages. She thought of the boarded house behind its wire-wrapped fence, the card lying on the stones inside the gate. Maybe no one had picked it up. Maybe someone had picked it up and thrown it out. Either way, sitting here would not change it. She set the ledger down and pulled a blank card from her satchel. She wrote the date, the time, and the maple tree across the front in her clearest hand. She wrote it the way she would have written it for any of them, a real invitation this time, not three vague lines. She slid it into an envelope and addressed it to the next name on her list. Then she made herself a rule. She would turn the phone face down. She would not flip it over again until she had finished the page. She finished the page. She copied seven more names, walked two of the cards to the post office, and bought stamps for the rest. When she came back to the bench, she let herself turn the phone over. One missed call. No voicemail. The number was not saved. The area code matched the boarded house. Her hand went cold around the case. She pressed call back before she could talk herself out of it. The line rang four times and went to a flat automated message. She did not leave one. She set the phone down and pressed her palms against her eyes. He had called. He had called and hung up, or she had missed him by minutes, and now the line on the other end was dead air. She did not know which was worse. She picked up her pen and wrote his initials in the ledger margin beside the date, so she would remember the hour later if it mattered. Then she closed the ledger and stood. Three friends still to find. She could not sit by the phone for the next twenty-two days waiting for a man who had already chosen, once, to hang up. She slung the satchel over her shoulder and started walking toward the next address on her list. The phone went into the inside pocket, screen against the lining, where she would feel it if it rang.