The beige walls pressed at her from every angle, and Irene barely kept herself from screaming.

"Miss Santos, are you all right? You seem to have gone quite pale all of a sudden." The lawyer's mild voice snapped her back to reality, and she forced herself to take a deep breath and reorient herself. The tedium and frustration bubbled and simmered within her for a long moment before eventually receding enough to leave her functional, if not precisely all right.

"Sorry. Yeah, I'm fine. There's just a lot to take in, and I don't—I'm not used to things being so crazy. Please, continue."

Sharp gray eyes peered at her through thick glasses, scanning her in moments and penetrating the transparent lie with discomforting ease. Irene could practically see the wheels turning in the other woman's head: Is she stable? Will I have to get a psychologist on the line to have a word with her? It was painfully obvious that the lawyer was unused to dealing with minors; everything from her too-neat desk and too-stiff blouse to the halting, inane introductions and pleasantries they had exchanged not five minutes ago. Together with the utter blandness of the office decor they grated against her senses like fine-grained sandpaper— a ceaseless irritant that never entered the realm of pain until everything was left raw and aching for days afterwards.

It wasn't her fault, not really. Banality was hardly an enormous fault. But in the awful, empty aftermath of a death, it seemed an affront to common decency that everyone in the world could just...carry on, leaving the fallen behind without so much as a stumble. Particularly when she found her own steps fettered into a halting crawl.

Beyond that, when there was nothing to hold her attention, she found herself thinking. And thoughts nowadays could only lead to further cracks in her entirely precarious focus and veneer of control.

The fluorescent lights overhead flickered, and the lawyer blinked, having evidently reached a conclusion. "Very well. As I was saying, your mother had no will to dictate the recipient of her estate; however, this shouldn't pose a problem as you are her only known descendant and therefore her legal heir. After the necessary paperwork is completed, you'll be given access to her savings account information, and by law the property in your apartment which was once hers is now yours. I can't be sure without seeing the numbers, but I suspect what remains in her account will be enough to pay off whatever debts she had before her death. Can you think of any organization in particular who might have an outstanding loan?"

Joining the army's engineer corps had taken the brunt of her mother's college debts, but there were still some remnants to pay off even after nearly two decades. Raising a daughter alone on an acceptable yet unimpressive salary had slowly been whittling away at it, and by now there was only a small amount left. Irene shook her head in a silent negative. The lawyer (how could she keep forgetting her name? It was like her eyes skimmed over the brass plaque on the woman's desk, letting the information slide away from her consciousness like the mundane details of the rest of the office) made a note on a sheet in front of her.

"That's good news, then. The manner of your mother's death also prevented a sizable chunk of funerary expenses from being necessary, and I know from experience it's very easy for that sort of thing to get out of hand and end up bankrupting families going through a loss. In a way, things have worked out in a fortunate manner for you."

She was beginning to suspect that the lawyer was operating under a rather unusual definition of the word 'fortunate.'

"I'm afraid there's going to be some bad news as well, or at least inconvenient news. Your mother was an only child, and we have no records of your father's identity. Are you in contact with anyone related to your grandparents?"

Irene had a vague memory of her grandmother as a large figure in a hideous purple dress, with warm smile and worn finger that ruffled through her hair. She had died when Irene was five, and her grandfather had followed not long after. Her mother had talked about them only rarely and in minuscule detail, so there was little else for her to cling to as an imprint.

"I don't even know if I have any relatives, and I'm definitely not in contact with any of them. They might all be dead now, for all I know— actually, that's a solid possibility. My grandmother was an only child as well, and I never knew my grandfather's family."

The lawyer pursed her lips and nodded. "I was afraid you might say that. The issue is that you're a minor, and you won't be legally independent for another three years. For the past several days, you've been staying with a friend of the family, correct?"

"Yeah. Mrs. Lernatovych has been staying with me. Her family lives next door, so...I guess she's just been there to make sure I eat, and I go to sleep at a decent hour. I haven't really been going to school, though. Is that going to get her in trouble?"

"It's nothing like that, Miss Santos. I'm sure your neighbor has done nothing wrong. However, she's not your relative and your mother had no will to to specify a guardian in the event of her death. I'm afraid as such, you can't be allowed to stay with her any longer; as you have now blood relatives, you'll be placed in a foster home until a judge can find an appropriate guardian. That procedure will probably take several weeks at least; if you're unlucky, the process might be dragged out for months. At this points, there's no real way to tell how it'll go."

The lights flickered. Irene's composure began to fray.

"There's more to that though, isn't there?" She was shocked at how her voice could sound at once so clear and so lifeless. "That's assuming the judge finds anyone who can take me. I know for a fact that Mrs. Lernatovych is in no position to keep me on permanently— she's got a kid in college and another two going the same direction, and they've all squeezed into an apartment that would be a little small for two people. My mom's never been close with her co-workers, and I have no relatives. Tell me honestly: what are the odds that a guardian for me actually exists?"

The pained hesitation in the other woman's face was more than enough of an answer. "I thought so."

"Miss Santos, I understand that you're...disappointed with this turn of events, but I'd like to reassure you that nothing is set in stone yet. There remains the chance that a guardian will be found for you in due time, but even should the search turn up empty you have nothing to fear from a foster home. I know you've heard the horror stories— I have, from people who themselves have never been involved with the process, but ask a social worker: your foster parents, whoever they might be, will have been vetted quite thoroughly by the government. In fact, they'll most likely be far better than I could ever be at offering meaningful consolation."

That was, of course, the central issue. She didn't want a stranger's pity, or even genuinely well-meaning consolation, assuming she even was offered it.

She wanted her mom.

"I'll give it some thought," she lied. "When do I need to have my stuff ready for...wherever they send me? It take some time to get everything ready, and I might need to make some difficult decisions." Difficult decisions which would determine whatever mementos of her only family she could keep, as well as those she might need to discard out of necessity even though it felt like blasphemy to consign it to a landfill.

The lawyer brushed a feather of deep brown, carefully styled hair out of her eyes. They didn't meet Irene's. "I can't be certain; that'll be up to the Department of Human Services. I suspect that you'll have a social worker come to make the arrangement s tomorrow. I can't say for sure when the move will take place."

They sat in silence for a moment, one clearly unsure of what to say, the other struggling to refrain from speaking at all. There was no point in speaking when it would turn into a shout, or a scream, or tears. There would be time enough for that when she got home, and Irene found herself loathing the mere notion of exposing a weakness to another person. Only a little while longer, and she could be alone and safe from the pitying eyes of others.

Something caught the lawyer's eye, and she broke the silence with obvious relief. "There is one thing that your mother left with the firm a number of years ago, to be given to you in the event of her death. It was a letter, strictly for your eyes only. You can read it now, or take it home with you for later, whichever you prefer."

Irene froze, not trusting herself to speak as the lawyer reached for a file at the corner of her desk and plucked from it an envelope, her name emblazoned on the front in faded, spiky writing that was agonizingly familiar. The lawyer had begun to speak again, but the words faded into a meaningless jumble of distant sounds in a matter of seconds— the entirety of her charge's attention had narrowed to focus on a single rectangle of crisp white paper sitting slightly swelled with its contents.

The closest thing she would ever have to her mother's final words, and it had been in the possession of strangers all this time. In her opinion, it was time this grievous error was rectified.

After a long moment, the envelope was proffered to her. It was all she could do not to snatch it away from the woman's hands and bolt as though she were grasping for a priceless treasure. Instead, she forced herself to accept it politely, even as her hand trembled with desire so close to realization.

Her fingers closed on the crisp, thick paper. The lawyer had fallen silent again, perhaps waiting for thanks. Were that the case, she might have to wait a while longer as Irene pulled herself together and remember that the outside world existed.

For a full five seconds her desire to rip the letter open immediately and pore through it over and over warred with her desire to go home and react to it as she felt best. The former won— to hell with the witnesses, she wasn't going to wait any longer to read her mom's final words to her. She took her callused fingers to the top of the envelope with more care and control than she felt, the sound of tearing paper shockingly loud in the silent office. After the only impediment had been left with a gaping, jagged hole, she removed the letter with the reverence a prospector might give to his first nugget of gold.

How strange that a mere three pages could weigh in her hands more heavily than anything she could have ever imagined.

She opened the letter and began to read:

My beautiful Irene,

Forgive your incompetent, engineer of a mother— I've never had a way with words, and I have no idea how to begin this kind of a letter. In all fairness, I don't know of anyone who's managed to come away from this experience satisfied with what they've left for their children, and trust me, I've known quite a few who tried. I guess in the end all we can hope is that ultimately our forays into the murky world of non-technical writing will eventually prove unnecessary, and we will all live to a ripe old age where all our secrets have been shared freely and with understanding. Failing that, we hope that even if our final words are awkward and poorly phrased, that the love, care, and lessons we've given will be enough of a memento anyways.

You're four years old now, and for the first time I've been called away overseas to oversee repairs of the aircraft in a camp outside of Baghdad. It should be an entirely routine mission, and barring disaster I'll be back in under two weeks to take you from the sitter's arms (Katya from next door is a wonderfully caring woman, but two weeks is too much to ask of even her.) Still, I can't dismiss the possibility that something will go wrong— this part of the world is troubled, and all too easily tensions could erupt into outright conflict again. More likely than not, it won't be my last trip, and there are somethings I need you to know, just in case I don't make it home to tell you myself when you're old enough to understand everything it involves.

It may seem cruel to tell you this now when I have no idea what age you will be when you find this letter, but the world is cruel, strange, and difficult place. There are people, countless people, who will try to tell you what to be, how to speak and dress, what to do and how to act. They will try very hard to make you into something you're not, because they've seen strange things in the world and decided that the only way to be safe is to be just as cruel, strange, and difficult.

Never let them win. And never let yourself become like them, because then they win just the same.

You aren't the same, my beloved daughter. You're a Santos, just like me, just like your grandmother. And I'm going to tell you a secret— we are not alone.

You may never see him for yourself, but the story of our family begins nearly a hundred years ago, when your great-great grandmother came to the United States and met someone very special in New York City— a tormented man, driven almost insane by voices he couldn't control or understand...

Irene read the rest of the letter. Then, she read it again. Then again.

Eventually, she sat back in her seat.

"Miss Santos? Are you all right?"

She took a shuddering breath in response. "I think so. However, things just got... complicated."