When we got home, I made Noah his evening snack and settled him at the kitchen table with his tablet and a cartoon, and then I went into the master bathroom and I locked the door behind me, because it was the only room in our small house with a lock, and I sat down on the edge of the porcelain tub with the envelope resting in my lap like a live grenade with the pin already pulled.

For a long time I just looked at it.

My daughter’s handwriting on the front.

My name.

The thing she had written in the last days of her life and entrusted to a stranger, the thing that had been kept from me for ten years, the answer to the question my grandson had been asking his whole childhood, sitting in my lap in a locked bathroom while cartoons played on the other side of the door.

For ten years I had built a quiet, safe, deliberately small life for the two of us.