And so the letters sat in that attic for decades

What a wonderful story - A Family's Lost Love Letters, a Stranger, and a History Revealed by Abigail Jones.

Caral explained that when her family first moved in, the house was bare except for a corner of the attic, where she found, in the dusty shadows, a blue hatbox with a gold braid around the edges. Inside, Caral found hundreds of letters, each one folded neatly inside an envelope, and on the front of each envelope, written in penmanship from a forgotten era, was “Miss Sally Anne Rudolph” and her address at the Parc Vendome.

Caral was 11 years old at the time, and she says that over the next few months, she read every letter in that hatbox in order, oftentimes ignoring her homework to find out what happened next in the love story between this woman named Sally and a man named Charlie. Caral was old enough to grasp the enormity of what she had discovered, but too young to understand why the letters might have been left behind or how to go about finding their owner. And so the letters sat in that attic for decades—until Caral’s mother decided to sell the house.

“I had to clean out all of my stuff from my childhood, and I knew that I had to take them. I have no idea why that was so important to me, but it was,” recalls Caral, who was in her 30s when her family moved. “I just couldn’t leave them.”