She shredded it. And then she wrote to Cami again.

Dear Cami,

If the killer kills me and not you, there’s a lot I need to tell you. Like how I’ve learned, with men, it’s better to overemote. My boyfriends didn’t believe I was sad unless I was crying. All the ways I’d taught myself to be guarded in my life—the ways I was taught not to be emotional if I wanted to be taken seriously, if I wanted to be given roles of authority—they didn’t work in a relationship. I had to be two different women. I had to be different women all the time.

She wrote another.

Dear Cami,

I want to tell you about the ways lovers can hurt you, because it’s unlike the ways anyone else can hurt you, the ways I’ve hurt you. Take this as an example: Once, a gnat flew toward my eye, would’ve flown into it, but I closed my eye in time. Not on purpose—you couldn’t time something like that—but by luck, by blinking. And in raising my eyelid again, I killed the gnat. I want to emphasize the ease of the progression of actions. You will feel as fragile as that, in love with another person, and that is how the other person’s strength will feel, as violently overwhelming as an eyelid to a piece-of-shit fly.

She touched the soft black walls of the pod. She remembered how Jana was using her scarf as a hijab. On her tablet, she wrote Jana, asking her to meet her at the mall’s food court after tutoring.

She wrote Cami one more letter.

Dear Cami,

Your abuelita once yelled, “I will not be your American!” at the mail. She tore up a letter about a preapproved credit card and shoved the pieces into the recycling. I thought I’d have to teach my future children about credit cards and debt and the American that America wants you to be. I would have taught you to yell, “I will not be your American!” when we looked at tuition costs for college. But I don’t have to teach you about any of those things. There is, though, this feeling still, that we should yell. There’s this broken idea of citizenship.

The light went on. She folded up the letters to Cami and put them in her purse next to the last one she’d written. She couldn’t believe, with everything that had happened, the papers in her purse had been left reasonably undisturbed.