你好

That was the only part of the letter that I could understand.

Those are the Chinese characters for "Hello" in Mandarin. Ni hao.

My step-cousin is Chinese, she is 18, two years older than I and finished "Chinese School" a few years back, she taught me those characters but not much else. It's too bad she doesn't talk to my step-dad, or anyone else in our family other than me. If she did, she could decode this messily scrawled no-return addressed letter with my name and address printed in English, but with the air that you would copy a stone with a famous Plato saying written in ancient greek onto an invitation to a theme party. My step-cousin and I communicate by email, she does not like to call and she lives in the next province over. I don't know what her problem is when it comes to her uncle but I am not forcing her to come back.

There was no way I could properly scan the mysteriously crumpled paper so I would send Ana an email.

I opened my inbox when I noticed something familiar about the letter. After studying the letter for another second I gasped, frozen with a fire bolt of fury and remembered my best friend's last day, her last breath.