On the first anniversary of his wife's death, a widower finally begins removing his wife's things from their room with the help of his sister-in-law. The job nearly completed, his sister-in-law calls his attention to three boxes apparently hidden by his wife under their bed. He did not know they existed, and therefore what was in them. When he reads the stories, he begins to recognize similarities between characters in the stories and people he and Ellen had met, places they had been, and life situations they had shared. As he reads the stories through a second time, they trigger memories, some wonderful, some painful, of their years together, and he orders the stories accordingly in his narrative. These stories become for him echoes of Ellen.