Inside were forty two folded notes. Not from anyone cruel. They were letters from a girl named Priya, a freshman on the junior squad, and Lila had been keeping every one. Priya’s parents were separating and she had started leaving notes because she could not say things out loud. Lila answered all of them. She had also been quietly covering Priya’s team fees out of her own babysitting money, which was why she flinched at her phone, because the balance kept running out and she did not know how to ask me for help.

The night she came home devastated, Priya had told her she was moving to her aunt’s house in another state. Lila thought she had failed the one person who needed her. The school had opened the locker because a teacher saw the folded papers and worried they were something dangerous.

I sat on the floor of her room that night and told her that carrying someone is not something she has to do alone. We paid the remaining fees together. Priya calls every Sunday, and last month she flew back for the winter showcase and sat in our kitchen eating cereal at eleven at night like she had never left. My daughter is not quieter anymore. She is careful now, in a way I respect. I spent months looking for what was wrong with her, when the truth was that she had been good all along and simply needed someone to notice.