This is a story about a woman who has been receiving someone else’s mail for nine years, what the mail has told her, and what has happened to her, over those nine years, as a result.

The woman — I will call her Margaret, because that is the name she would like to use, and because she is, in her own quiet way, one of the more interesting people I have spoken with this year — is fifty-eight. She lives in a small house in the East Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati. She has lived in the house since 2016. She bought it, with her husband, four months before he died.

She has been receiving mail addressed to a previous tenant named David Petersen for the entire nine years she has lived there.

The first letter

The first piece of mail addressed to David Petersen arrived approximately two weeks after Margaret moved in. It was a credit card statement. Margaret, who was at that point still in the early weeks of widowhood, opened it by mistake — she had been opening all her mail without looking at the names, because she had been opening all her mail in a kind of fog — and then realized, too late, that it was not for her.

She closed it. She put it in a separate small pile. She wrote “RETURN TO SENDER — NOT AT THIS ADDRESS” on the envelope, in pen, and put it back in the mailbox.

It came back. It came back the next month. And the month after that.

Eventually, she stopped writing on the envelopes.

What she learned

The mail kept coming. Not in any large quantity — perhaps four to six items per month, spread across different senders. Over the years, Margaret has received, in David Petersen’s name:

— Credit card statements
— Catalogs from a fly fishing equipment company
— Annual letters from a fraternity alumni association
— Quarterly reports from a financial advisor
— Birthday cards from someone named Linda, every year, in May
— A jury duty summons (2018)
— A notice of a class action settlement (2020)
— A wedding invitation (2021)
— A change-of-address notification from the wedding invitation’s bride, sent to “all our contacts” with a list of David’s friends BCC’d in the email signature, which Margaret was, somehow, on
— A baby announcement (2022)
— A medical billing dispute (2023)
— A small handwritten note from someone named Pat, in 2024, that said only: “Glad you’re back on your feet. Pat.”

I asked Margaret if she had ever opened any of these.

She said: “I have, over the years, opened some of them. Yes. Not all. But some.”

I said: “Which ones.”

She said, after a pause: “The ones that looked personal.”

The intimacy

What follows is the part of the story I have been turning over in my mind.

Margaret has, over nine years, assembled a picture of a man she has never met. From the mail, she has determined the following:

That David Petersen is, by her best estimate, in his mid-fifties. (The fraternity alumni letters confirm his graduation year.) That he is a fly fisherman. (The catalogs.) That he had, at one point, financial difficulties that became a class-action issue. (2020.) That he remarried in 2021. (The wedding invitation, addressed to “David and the new Mrs. Petersen.”) That he and his new wife had a child in late 2022. (The baby announcement.) That he was, in 2023, briefly seriously ill, in a way that left him with a medical billing dispute he had not yet resolved. (The dispute correspondence, which she did read.) That he was back on his feet by 2024. (The note from Pat.)

That his birthday is in May. (Linda.)

Margaret has never met David Petersen. She does not know what he looks like. She has never tried to contact him, because she has always assumed — and I think this is partly correct — that contacting him would, in some small way, transform the situation into something other than what it is, and she is not yet sure she wants to do that.

She has, however, come to feel something for him.

I asked her what it was.

She said: “I think of him the way you might think of a neighbor you have seen at a distance for many years and waved to but never actually spoken with. I know things about him. He does not know that I know them. He does not know I exist. I would not have noticed any of this if he had not, somehow, forgotten to update his address with about fifteen different organizations in 2016. I cannot decide whether that is sad, or funny, or simply the way things work.”

The recent year

In the past year, the volume of David’s mail has dropped. Significantly.

Margaret, who has been tracking the mail almost without meaning to, noticed the change in late January. The mail that had been arriving steadily for nine years — the catalogs, the alumni letters, the quarterly reports — slowed down. By March, she was receiving David’s mail perhaps once a month, if that.

By April, almost nothing.

This is, I want to be clear, probably good news. Mail volume drops because addresses get updated. Senders eventually catch up. Databases get cleaned. The most likely explanation is that David, after nine years, has finally finished the slow administrative work of telling everyone where he lives.

But Margaret has begun to worry.

She has begun to worry because she does not know which of the two possible explanations is true. Either David has finally updated his address everywhere — which would mean, she has said, “he is fine, and I am no longer in his life in this small way I never asked to be in his life.” Or something has happened to him — which would mean, she has said, “he is not fine, and I am one of the only people who has been quietly watching, and I do not know what to do about that.”

She has not, she has told me, decided whether to find him.

The small thing she did

In May, Margaret did something small.

She sent David Petersen a birthday card. She used the address that had appeared, several years ago, on a returned-mail envelope from a piece of correspondence he had sent to someone else — a New York address, which she has reason to believe is where he now lives. The card said, in handwriting Margaret has described to me as “deliberately neutral”:

“Happy birthday. From a previous neighbor. Hope you are well.”

She did not sign her name. She did not include her own address. She did not include any way for David to write back.

She sent it.

She told me, when I asked her why, that she had done it for two reasons. The first was that, if something had happened to him, the card would simply not be received, and she would not have to think about it any further. The second was that, if he was fine, she wanted — for reasons she could not entirely explain — to have, in some small way, made contact with the man whose life she had been quietly observing for nearly a decade.

She has not heard back.

She did not expect to.

She has decided, she has told me, that the lack of a response is itself a kind of answer — that David is, probably, fine, and that her nine-year accidental relationship with him has, in some quiet way, ended.

What this is

I have, in the weeks since Margaret first told me this story, found myself thinking about how many of these small accidental relationships people have. The neighbor whose schedule you know by sound. The barista whose name you have never asked but whose order you could recite. The stranger you sat next to on a flight nine years ago who told you something true about themselves, whom you have thought about, on and off, ever since.

We tend to think of relationships as the people we have chosen. But there is a much larger category, I think, of the people we have not chosen — the ones who, through the small administrative accidents of modern life, have ended up in our orbit anyway. We do not have a name for this category. We mostly do not talk about it. (For an adjacent piece on this terrain, see the Wattalife story about the woman whose therapist had been retired for two years and the relationship that, by accident, continued anyway.)

Margaret asked me, in our final conversation, whether I thought she should have sent the card.

I said: “I think so.”

She said: “I think so too.”

She paused.

She said: “I will miss him.”

—

Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, since reporting this story, checked her own mailbox carefully for several weeks, looking for the names of strangers she has, unknowingly, been receiving mail for. She has not yet found any. She is not entirely sure how to feel about this.