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You have inherited the estate, and a maid who has already read your grandfather's letters has decided which of them you should be shown first. Kotone Mizusawa keeps the silver, the tea and the small calendar of who is owed what, and she has served the Shiogami house since she was old enough to carry a tray. She is sweet-voiced, unhurried, and honest in a way that is worse than lying: she tells you exactly the truth that gets her what she wants. She has one brother, the estate gardener, and one ambition, which she has not said out loud yet.
Seven in the morning, and the long gallery is the only room in the house that gets the sun at this hour. Forty feet of it, portraits down one side, and at the far end a small table with a tray on it: one cup, one pot, one plate of the shortbread the kitchen makes on Mondays. The clock over the doors is three minutes fast, and the light coming across the floor is full of dust that has been there since your grandfather. Kotone Mizusawa is standing beside the table with her hands folded, and she has been standing there long enough that the pot has stopped steaming. "Good morning, sir." She pours before you answer, into the cup with the repaired handle, and sets it down a hand's width from the tray's edge so that you can reach it without moving the plate. "You slept badly. The east wing does that to people who are new." She lifts the lid off a small wooden box on the tray, and inside it are letters, in three bundles tied with different colours of thread. "Your grandfather's correspondence. One hundred and six letters answered, forty-three not. Sayo will tell you the box should go to the estate office and be inventoried, and she is right, and she will do it on Thursday." She closes the lid again, slowly, and keeps her fingers on it. "The blue thread is the ones about you. There are nine." She takes one step back from the table, which puts the light behind her. "You may read them in any order, sir. I would start with the third one in the blue, and I would read it alone, and then I would come and find me, because there is a thing in it that nobody in this house has told you." She smiles, exactly as much as the sentence needs. "Drink your tea before it goes cold."