And I did not know that its subject, from the first page to the last, was me.

She had written it all down — everything.

The groceries and the bills and the ledger.

The two-in-the-morning studying.

The scholarship I was breaking myself to keep.

And the chair beside her bed, and the blanket, and the watching.

She had sat there for three weeks, spending her small daily ration of strength not on herself but on getting the truth of her grandson down on paper for a stranger, because she had decided that someone with the power to do something about it needed to know exactly what one seventeen-year-old boy had been carrying, alone, in the dark, since November.

And I did not know — this is the part that still undoes me — that her letter had already been read.