Page 41 of Legacy Ascended

"The statement doesn't say," Elise says. "Marla writes about the first winter. About her going to the window whenever a cart came up the road, and how long it took before she stopped."

I read that part twice. Halfway through the second time, the words blur and I have to stop.

"Do you want to stop?" Torres asks.

"No."

"Okay."

He moves his hand from my knee to the back of my neck, under my hair, and leaves it there.

"There's one more thing in it," Elise says. "Marla wrote down a line Victoria kept repeating. Something she'd heard the adults saying before any of it started."

"Say it."

"They want it all under one hand."

Freya's pen stops.

"Who were they?" I ask.

"Marla didn't know."

"Whose hand?"

"She didn't know that either."

I look at the sentence again. "Then what does this give us?"

"If the paper and handwriting authenticate, it tells us Marla recorded those words long before anyone knew about you."

"And that people inside the House were afraid before the attack."

"It tells us Victoria remembered them being afraid," Elise says. "She was six. We don't know what she understood."

I want that sentence to mean my family was framed. It doesn't. Not by itself.

"Why did you bring it?"

Elise looks down at Marla's statement before she answers.

"Hess gave you names and dates," she says. "This tells you Victoria waited at a window for her family. I thought you deserved to know that too."

"That doesn't undo what your valley did to me."

"No," she says. "It doesn't, and I'm not offering it as though it does. That's a different conversation and I'll sit through all of it whenever you want it."

"I want a copy after it's authenticated."

"You'll have one."

"And I want someone outside the valley to examine it."

"That's why I brought it," Elise says.

Then she turns the last sheet so it faces me, and steps back.

For most of the statement, Marla calls her the child. The child slept. The child would not eat. The child went to the window whenever she heard wheels on the road.