What Was Inside

She did not open it on the train. She opened it in a bathroom stall on the concourse, hands shaking, the tape peeling away in long ugly strips. Inside was a phone. An old phone, cheap, the kind you buy with cash. It was switched off. Taped to the back was a folded slip of paper, and on the paper, in small careful handwriting, was a name. Her own name. Her full legal name, the one almost nobody knew, the one from before she changed it. Nadia sat down on the closed lid of the toilet and felt the forty minutes shrink around her like a wet rope. The package was not something she was carrying to Pier 9. The package was a message about her, and she was simply the cheapest way to make sure it arrived.