She kept wearing the same perfume. Or maybe she just kept it to put on the letters. All the letters in the box smelled like her. He couldn't open it yet, but he could smell it and he closed his eyes to focus on the way it made it tingle behind his eyes.

He'd found it outside his door that morning, a wooden box, painted with flowers on the sides and a bird singing on the lid; a nightingale which had been half-covered by a yellow post-it with just his name on it – just "Steve Rogers" in measured printing. He opened it cautiously, unsure of what he should expect, and somehow unsurprised by the yellowed sheets – letters – and envelopes that he found, filling it. He picked it up and took it inside, set it on his desk. He took one of the envelopes and saw impossibly familiar handwriting, and in the flurry of dust and stale air caused by the shifting paper, smelled something he'd known only briefly, in passing drafts and one close, warm moment he'd never forgotten.

He held the oldest letter; the first one she'd written. It was sealed with wax, still closed. There was no seal, just her fingerprint to stick it down. He placed his finger on top of it, covered it completely. It snapped as it opened.

There were hundreds of letters, one each month from two years after he crashed to this year, and photographs. Of Peggy on her wedding day, of her birthdays, of Christmases and her and her babies from the days they were born. In every photo she looked more and more beautiful. Her husband's name was James Coulson, and they had a little house in Brooklyn above their book store. They had three kids, two boys and a girl, all gorgeous. Phillip was the oldest, then Emily and little Steve. She told him about how Emily broke her arm when she fell off her bike and Steve got pneumonia when he fell through the ice when he went skating and how Phil ran around with a garbage can lid James painted with a star and he never came home for dinner without scraped knees and muddy hands, and later how Emily married a boy from Alabama and Steve became a doctor at the top of his class, and how Phil had a job with the government but couldn't tell her anything and how he'd gloated for weeks when he finally got higher clearance than she had. She finally found out what he did one Thanksgiving when she realized his little sister had wrinkles and he didn't.

Every letter he read got wet.

In the last envelope, there was a small slip of thick paper with black writing inviting him to the funeral home on Third that evening, and that evening the was a young man crying quietly at the door, crying not because the woman he'd loved had aged, but because she had aged without him. He realized he'd missed her, that he had had time. He left quietly like he'd came, and went home, and read the last line of the last letter one more time.

I'm still mad at you for being late.