Whatever is inside it, I will read it as the woman I have become, and not the woman I was — not the one who stayed quiet to keep the peace, who let a family drain her accounts and diminish her worth and treat her as a resource, but the one who cancelled the card with a single click, who smiled at a man standing over her broken laptop, who followed the money all the way down to the truth.

Because that is the last thing the whole ordeal gave me, and the thing I will carry into whatever the envelope holds.

For eight years I let other people tell me the story of my own life — who I was, what I was worth, why I was there, how much I was permitted to want.

I will not do that again.

Whatever my father and Alistair arranged, whatever reason I was brought into that family, whatever the sealed letter reveals about a history I never knew I had — I will meet it the way Alistair taught me, without meaning to, from beyond his grave.