Please know I would never kill someone. I hope that you don’t need to hear that but maybe you do. Maybe I will have changed. Or I’ll die before you know me well. The chance that I die before you grow up seems like a real possibility now.

I also want you to know that it wasn’t hard to pretend for you that the world was well, normal, as it should be. My mother pretended with me. Police were killing Black men and women and children, trans men and women, unarmed, when their hands were up, or when they were running away, or sitting on a park bench. I was your age. My mother didn’t tell me. I found out about it later, but when I was still a child. When I found out, I didn’t understand why a thing like injustice existed. I didn’t understand any unfairness, at its simplest form. I understood happenstance, how people died because a branch fell on their head. But not unfairness, dependent on people.

You will learn about World War II and how anti-Semitism traveled the world and you won’t believe in a God I never told you about. You will learn about slave ships and slavery. You will learn about the mistreatment of women across every culture. Knowledge will pass in and out of you and change you until you are so lost. And then you’ll go to work in the morning. Or you’ll wake up to your own child and smile at them, despite yourself.

Izabel didn’t shred this letter. She folded it up small and put it in her purse.

When they got home, Kaito pulled Izabel into their bedroom.

“We need to talk about this.”

“About what?”

“Last night . . . Did Cami know—that that family had died?”

“How could she?” Izabel said, only saying it to sound like the rational one between them, maybe for the first time.

“I don’t know,” Kaito said, “but it happened.”

“It sounded like it happened, but maybe that’s not what happened.”

“That sounded like gibberish, but I know what you mean.”

“Thanks,” Izabel said.

“I mean that’s not—”

“It’s fine.”

“What do you think happened?” he said.

“The question that matters to me is, What can we do about it? Nothing, right? We can’t tell anyone without sounding crazy and there’s nothing really to tell. So what’s the point in talking about it?”

“Because it was weird. It was weird, and I want to talk about it.”

“Okay. Maybe another time then. I had a long day and I’m tired and I’m hungry right now.”

“Fine,” he said.

And they left the bedroom, annoyed with each other.

Around the table together, Cami asked for another story. Kaito told one about an old couple who lived a meager life and loved their dog very much.

“Shiro!” Cami said.

“That’s right,” Kaito said.