One day, young Gale overheard a terrible secret about her best friend Angie: Angie’s sister Pauline, who wrote her weekly, had in fact already died of TB. “But her father didn’t want her to know,” Gale recalled, because it might cause the kind of emotional shock that was deemed dangerous to the TB patient. So to encourage the daughter he still had, this father wrote letters that mimicked the handwriting and style of the daughter he’d lost.
