The nameless envelope had been waiting so long that Temi had started to think of it less as a letter and more as a piece of furniture — a thing that simply belonged in the room now, like the lamp or the bed frame.
She opened it standing at the window, the way her mother always read important mail, as though the light outside might help make sense of what was inside.
It was short. Four sentences, in the careful, late-years handwriting. It did not explain the other forty letters, or apologize for the years of silence between intention and ink. It only said what it said, plainly, the way her mother had rarely managed to say things out loud.
Temi read it twice. Then she turned it over, and found one more line on the back, added later, in a different pen — a postscript written, she guessed, sometime after the rest, when her mother must have thought she had more time than she did.
Outside, the street was drying in patches under the returning sun. Temi folded the letter along its original creases, set it on the windowsill where the light could reach it, and, for the first time in eleven months, let herself cry without trying to stop.