said softly. “It’s not what you think.”
“Then who are you?” My voice sounded thin, foreign, borrowed from someone else. “Why would you say something like that to me?”
“Because you deserved to hear it from a person, not from paperwork.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket.
My hands turned cold. I gripped the edge of the table, bracing for the worst.
What he set down was not what I’d anticipated.
It was a small square of faded paper, its edges soft from decades of handling. He
