The words appeared when the seam opened: come before the rain. They were printed on a thin scrap used to strengthen the repair. After her grandmother's death, Pia wondered whether the instruction had been hidden deliberately in the coat.
A second scrap inside the other sleeve completed an advertisement for a garden sale. Her grandmother reused whatever paper was at hand while preparing repairs, then removed most of it after stitching. A few fragments remained because they were caught under the lining.
Pia found the mending notebook and recognized the same practical economy in its entries. The coat itself carried genuine family history: a note recorded whose shoulders it had been altered to fit at different times. She had overlooked that plain account while pursuing the more mysterious fragment.
She repaired the opened seam and preserved the advertisement pieces separately. The coat did not lose interest when the hidden sentence became ordinary. Its alterations told a longer story of people growing, borrowing and passing it on, written in measurements her grandmother had intended someone else to understand.