The envelope was cream-colored and had not aged. Saro's parents had kept it in the safety deposit box at the bank where her father had an account, and when he died she had retrieved it with the other papers, and when she moved she had moved it, and for thirty-two years it had been in the small fireproof lockbox on the top shelf of the closet she had never fully unpacked.
She opened it in the car. She had not planned to. She had retrieved the lockbox to find her passport, and the envelope had been under everything else, and she sat with it in the parking garage for a long time.
The handwriting was not what she expected. She had expected something formal, symbols she wouldn't recognize. It was ordinary cursive, a little cramped, the kind her elementary school teachers had used. Two sentences.
You did not know what it was while you were in it.
You will know at the end.
She sat with this.
The garage smelled of cold exhaust. A man got out of the car next to hers without looking at her. The letter was for her specifically, not a form, not a generic assurance. Death had known, at the moment of her birth, something about her life that required these particular words.
She was not sure what she felt. Something like recognition. Not of the words, which she had never heard before, but of the thing they were describing, which she had always known was there.
She found her passport. She was twenty minutes late.