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The word sounded ridiculous in the bright little room.

I reached immediately for Ben at seventeen, sprawled across our family-room sofa with one foot on the coffee table while he argued that his curfew was unreasonable because everyone else’s parents let their kids stay out until two. I remembered being furious about the shoe on the table.

I remembered Paul lowering the newspaper and saying, “Your mother asked you to move your foot.”

I could see the sofa, his long legs and a red Wisconsin sweatshirt I’d almost certainly bought him, but I couldn’t made out the features of his face.

I jumped out of bed before I could think about that too long.

The notebook was where I’d left it, tucked in the bedside drawer beneath an old Glamour magazine. I’d been writing in it since the first memory wavered, adding whatever I could remember.

By now the first pages looked slightly unhinged. There were names and places, partial telephone numbers, arrows connecting thoughts I’d apparently believed would make more sense later, that meant nothing to me now. Claire and Ben’s names appeared more than once. So did several things about Paul that I’d written late at night and then stared at the next morning wondering why I’d thought anyone needed to know that my husband disliked wet bath mats.

I sat at the little table and opened to the first blank page.

Yesterday’s damp clothes were draped over a chair and my Keds sat near the door stuffed with newspaper to make them dry faster.

I picked up the pencil.

Claire could never lie to me about breaking something because⁠—

I stopped. Because what? She looked guilty before she said a word. Everybody looked guilty when they broke something. My daughter had a tell, I knew she did.

When she was little, she’d broken one of my mother’s crystal birds and denied touching it while pieces of crystal were still caught in the cuff of her sweater. Later there had been a lamp, a vase, and one spectacularly stupid incident involving nail polish on the upstairs carpet.

What did she do when she lied? I’d known it yesterday, I was certain of it.

The detail vanished. One moment I could feel the answer, and the next there was a blank place where it had been.

I lifted the pencil as my hands started shaking.

“All right,” I whispered. “Fine.”

My son. Teaching him to drive. Ben gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles had gone pale while I sat in the passenger seat pretending I wasn’t nervous.

Paul had refused to teach him after the first lesson. That part remained beautifully clear.

“I have strengths,” Paul had said, handing me the keys. “This isn’t one of them.”

I started writing.

Ben learned to drive in the Volvo. He always said⁠—

I stopped again. There had been a phrase. Every time I told him to slow down, he’d said the same thing. Something sarcastic. Something that had driven me crazy enough that years later we still joked about it.

I could remember my irritation, reaching for the imaginary brake pedal on the passenger side, and the exact feeling of being his mother in that car, responsible for another life, but the words were gone.

I leaned back and stared at the page.

Before, the future had become fuzzy when I tried to reach too far into it. Names disappeared, numbers wouldn’t come, and I forgot places.

This felt different. I had the memories until I tried to preserve them. I turned back several pages.

Things I’d written earlier were still there, although many of them didn’t make sense.

A street name in Cleveland, the beginning of a telephone number, a birthday.

I touched the paper. I’d thought the notebook would be insurance.