Angela had taken it down twice since the first day of spring and put it back both times, not out of doubt, but out of a sense that some things deserved a moment of their own. On a quiet evening, with the rain finished and the court outside smelling of wet pavement, she set the case on the kitchen table in front of Malik and opened the lid.
The flag lay folded in its triangle. The photographs sat beneath it in their sleeve. And under the photographs, in a plain envelope, was the letter.
"David gave me this the week after the review ended," Angela said. "Your father wrote it when you were eight years old. He gave it to David to keep, with the rest of his papers, in case anything ever happened and he could not give it to you himself."
Malik did not reach for it at once. He looked at the handwriting on the envelope. His name, in a hand he had seen on exactly three things in his life: a birthday card, a note taped to the refrigerator the week before the accident, and the inside cover of a toolbox in the garage.
"Your name," Angela said gently. "In his writing. Go ahead."
He slid the letter out and unfolded it. Two pages, closely written, the pen pressed hard in the places where his father had wanted the words to stay.
He read it standing at the kitchen table, and then he sat down.
My son, it began, and then, a paragraph in, the sentences Angela had known were coming, the ones she had not read herself, because David had told her only that they were there and that they were Malik's.
"There will be people who decide things about you before they know you," Malik read, half aloud, the way a person reads when the words are too large to keep silent. "Their judgment does not determine your worth."
He went on more quietly. Angela stood at the counter with her hands folded and let him have the room.
"Do not let someone else's prejudice teach you to hate yourself," he read. His voice caught once, and he stopped, and breathed, and continued. "If you ever have power over another person, remember that power is a responsibility, not a reward."
He read the rest in silence, his free hand flat on the table as if to hold himself in place. Near the end he slowed down.
"You do not have to become me," he read. "You only have to become someone you can respect when you look in the mirror."
And then the last lines, which he read twice, the second time barely above a whisper.
"I love you more than I know how to explain. Always, Dad."
The kitchen was very quiet. Malik folded the letter along its old creases with a care that made his hands look, for a moment, much older than sixteen.
"He wrote that when I was eight," he said.
"He wrote it because he knew the world," Angela said. "And because he knew you."
Malik turned the folded letter over once in his hands.
"Do you think he'd be proud of me?"
Angela came around the table and put both hands on his shoulders, and he leaned back against her the way he had when he was small, without embarrassment, without needing to hide it.
"Malik," she said, "he was proud of you before you had done a single thing to earn it. It is pride written ahead of time, because he knew it would keep."
He nodded. He could not speak for a moment. Then he opened the black case and laid the letter in it, on top of the photographs, under the fold of the flag, and closed the lid with both hands.
"I am keeping it there," he said. "With his things. Where it was."
"That is where it belongs," Angela said.
The championship game was three weeks later, in a gym two towns away, with bleachers and a scoreboard that buzzed every time it changed.
Malik's team was down by nine at halftime, and the nine points felt heavier than they were. The other school was bigger at every position. Their center had blocked Malik twice in the first half, and Malik had come up off the floor both times with his jaw set.
In the locker room, Coach Reynolds did not shout. He drew two lines on the whiteboard and talked about spacing, about making the defense choose, about trusting the pass earlier than felt safe.
"You are trying to beat five men by yourself," he told the room, and looked at no one and everyone. "Stop. Beat them with each other."
Malik sat with his elbows on his knees and turned the silver coin over in his fingers under the towel on his lap. He had carried it the whole season, and that night he had slipped it into the top of his sock before the game. He could feel it there now, flat against his ankle, worn and warm.