The letter arrived on a Thursday, on a day that had given Laura no reason to expect anything important from it. She had an afternoon class, a paper she had been putting off for reasons she preferred to call scheduling, and a piano practice room reserved for four o’clock. She had gone back to her apartment between classes because she had forgotten a book, although by the time she reached the door she could no longer remember which book it was.

The mail was lying on the floor beneath the slot. Most of it was ordinary: a department-store advertisement, something addressed to a previous tenant, and a postcard announcing a campus event she had no intention of attending. Beneath those was a large envelope with the name of a law school printed in the upper corner.

Laura recognized it immediately and stood for several seconds holding it. She had known, of course, that answers would eventually come. That was the purpose of sending applications. She had filled out forms, requested transcripts, taken the LSAT, asked professors for recommendations, and written an essay about herself that had taken considerably longer than seemed reasonable for someone who presumably knew the subject. Then she had mailed the applications and somehow managed to return law school to the future, where it had remained comfortably theoretical.

The envelope made that arrangement considerably more difficult.

She carried the mail into the kitchen and put everything on the table, with the law school envelope on top. She took off her jacket, found the book she had come home for, and poured herself a glass of water. None of those things required much thought, which was probably why she did them. The envelope remained where she had left it.

There had been a time when Laura thought decisions announced themselves more clearly. A person came to a fork and chose one road or the other. There might be uncertainty beforehand and regret afterward, but the moment itself would be recognizable. Increasingly, her life seemed unwilling to cooperate with that theory. She had not decided to become independent; she had gone away to college. She had not decided to become a musician; she had kept playing. She had not decided to become an athlete; she had put on running shoes and gone running often enough that eventually people described her that way. Even law school had begun with a professor asking a question she had not been thinking about until he asked it.

Most of the important changes in her life seemed to arrive disguised as ordinary things. Apparently one of them could arrive in the mail.

Laura finally sat down and picked up the envelope. It was heavier than she expected, although she knew that meant nothing. Colleges could put almost anything into an envelope—brochures, housing information, financial-aid forms, maps of buildings she had never seen. A rejection could probably be made equally heavy if somebody in admissions had a sufficiently cruel sense of humor. The thought made her smile, and perhaps because smiling had made the thing seem ordinary again, she slipped a finger beneath the flap and opened it.

The first word that mattered was pleased.

She read the sentence once, then again. The school was pleased to offer her admission to the entering class.

Laura leaned back in the chair and looked at the letter. She had imagined this moment several times, though never deliberately. In some versions she had been excited. In others she had immediately begun making plans. Once, while running, she had imagined calling her parents from a pay phone and announcing that she was going to law school as though she had just been elected to something.

The actual moment was quieter. She was sitting in her apartment. Someone upstairs was walking heavily across the floor. A truck changed gears on the street outside. Her glass of water sat beside the envelope, leaving a damp circle on the table. She read the letter a third time and discovered that the words had not changed.

It was strange how quickly a possibility could acquire weight. Until that afternoon, law school had existed among several futures. She could talk about it, think about it, even apply to it, and still keep it at a comfortable distance because there had always been another step between where she stood and any actual decision.

Now someone on the other end had said yes.

She folded the letter along its original crease and put it back into the envelope, then took it out again. There was apparently no useful purpose to either action, and she was still considering this when she noticed the time. She was going to be late for class. That fact, at least, required no reflection.

The letter traveled with her for the rest of the afternoon, tucked inside her backpack while a professor talked about something Laura normally would have found interesting, while she stopped for coffee, and while she crossed campus with a friend who finally asked why she seemed distracted.

“I got into law school.”

Her friend stopped walking. “You did?”

Laura nodded, and before she had decided whether the occasion required hugging, her friend had already hugged her.

“That’s wonderful.”

“I think so.”

Her friend stepped back. “You think so?”

“I just found out.”

“You applied.”

“I know.”

“You took the test.”

“I know.”

“You wrote all those essays.”

“I know.”

“And now you’re surprised they might let you in?”

Laura considered this. “When you put it that way, it sounds unreasonable.”

“It sounded unreasonable before I put it that way.”

They continued across campus, passing students carrying books and cups of coffee while bicycles rattled along the walkway. The campus had once seemed enormous to Laura. Now she knew its shortcuts and quiet corners, which buildings had the cleanest bathrooms, and which vending machine occasionally gave you two candy bars instead of one.

“Are you going?” her friend asked.

Laura looked across the familiar campus. “I don’t know.”

Her friend nodded and, for once, did not argue.

Laura almost skipped piano practice that afternoon. For a few minutes the acceptance seemed important enough to justify abandoning whatever she had planned before it arrived. But the practice room was reserved, and the recital had not made music disappear from her life any more than taking the LSAT had. So she went, placed the backpack beside the piano bench, and began with scales.

Her hands knew what to do without consulting the part of her mind occupied by the letter. She moved into a piece she had been working on, stopped after a mistake, backed up several measures, and played the passage again. The second time was better. She worked on it until it was better still, and somewhere in the process she forgot about law school altogether.

She liked that.

Nearly an hour later, when she finished, the envelope was still in the backpack. Nothing had vanished while she played.

That evening she called home. Her mother answered and asked how her day had been, and Laura said it had been pretty good. There was a pause during which she realized she was enjoying having information her mother did not yet possess.

“I got a letter.”

“What kind of letter?”

“From law school.”

Her mother’s voice changed immediately. “And?”

“I got in.”

“Oh, Laura.”

The pleasure in her voice was so immediate that Laura laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“I knew you would.”

“You did not.”

“I thought you would.”

“That’s different.”

Her mother called for her father, and a moment later he picked up the other phone.

“What happened?”

“She got into law school.”

“Which one?”

Laura told him. There was a brief silence, and she could almost hear him rearranging the information into practical categories.

“When do you have to decide?”

Her mother said, “Could you let her be accepted for thirty seconds before you start scheduling her?”

“I’m just asking.”

“I know.”

“The date’s in the letter,” Laura said. “I have some time.”

“Did they say anything about financial aid?”

Her mother sighed.

“What?” her father said.

“Nothing,” Laura said. “There are forms.”

“There are always forms,” he said.

That sounded sufficiently like him that the conversation settled into familiar territory. They talked about the school, what Laura knew about it and what she didn’t, and whether she should visit. Her father thought she should, because there were things a person could learn only by going there. Her mother thought she should too, although Laura suspected her reasons were somewhat different. Her father wanted information. Her mother wanted Laura to see how the place felt.

Neither of them asked whether she was actually going until they had been talking for several minutes. Finally her mother said, “So, do you think you want to go?”

Laura looked around the apartment while she considered the question. The piano music she had brought home was stacked on the desk. Her running shoes were beside the door. On a chair lay the dress she had bought during the summer road trip, still more expensive than it had needed to be. There were textbooks on the table, a photograph of friends on the refrigerator, and somewhere in a drawer an old address David had written down for her months earlier.

None of those things seemed to belong to a different life.

“I don’t know yet,” she said.

“All right.”

That was all her mother said, and Laura waited for something more. Her father did not fill the silence either.

A few years earlier, their lack of advice might have disappointed her. She would have wanted someone to tell her what the sensible choice was, or at least make a strong enough argument that she could measure her own reaction against it. Now their silence felt different. They were not withholding advice.

They were leaving the decision with her.

After the call, Laura made dinner and spread the material from the law school across the table. There were tuition figures, housing information, course descriptions, and photographs of serious-looking students carrying books through buildings that seemed designed to make education look permanent. She read some of it before deciding she had read enough.

There would be time for comparisons. There might be other letters. There would be numbers and visits and conversations and lists. Her father would undoubtedly think of questions she had not thought to ask. Her friends would have opinions. The professor who had started all of this with one unexpected question would probably say considerably less than she wanted him to.

Eventually she would choose.

But not that night.

For years Laura had thought the future was something waiting farther downstream, beyond the next bend, where it might finally become visible if she traveled far enough. She was beginning to understand that it rarely worked that way. The river carried things forward before anyone knew exactly where they were going. Music had come with her. So had family and friendship, running and summer roads, mistakes, questions, people she had loved for years and people she had known only briefly. None of them had required her to become only one person.

Law school might travel with her too. Or it might not.

The letter had not answered that question. It had only made the question hers.

Laura turned off the kitchen light and started toward her room. Halfway down the hall she remembered the acceptance letter still lying on the desk and went back for it. She read the first paragraph once more, not because she had forgotten what it said but because she wanted to see the words again.

Then she smiled, folded the letter carefully, and put it away.

Tomorrow she could begin deciding what came next.