And now here was her hand again, forming my name, on an envelope I had never seen, and it was as if she had reached out of the ground and tapped me on the shoulder, the distinctive sweeping cursive she had used since she was a teenager, with the slightly tilted capital M that she made on the front of every card and note she had ever given me.

I knew that M the way you know a face.

I had a decade of birthday cards and grocery lists and school-notice signatures filed away in my memory, all of them with that same tilted M, and here it was again, on an envelope held out to me by a stranger in a graveyard ten years after my daughter had died.

My daughter’s hand had made these marks.