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The entries run years apart. Whole stretches of nothing. Then:

She reaches for the hall mirror. Four months old. I turned it to the wall and she cried for an hour.

Six today. She asked why the candles go out when she's sad. I told her the windows leak.

I put my hand flat on the page.

She knew.

Every year of my life, she knew, and she wrote it in a book she never gave me, and she buried the book under my mittens.

Gage crouches beside me. He doesn't take it out of my hands. He reads over my shoulder with his palms on his knees, and I let him.

Further in, the writing gets smaller.

E. came again. Second time this year. She wants me to bring her in before she's eleven so they can test her. She said the word safe nine times. I counted.

I read it twice.

"E."

Gage has gone very still. "Could be anybody."

"Could be." I turn the page. "Do you think it's anybody?"

He doesn't answer. He's smarter than that.

The others came in September. They didn't knock. They want the same thing she wants, and only one of them says please, and I can't decide which of those is worse.

Neither of them will say the word out loud in my house. They walk around it like a hole in the floor.

Then, three pages on, in a pen that ran dry halfway through the line:

There is a word for what she'll be. I'm not going to write it down. Words like that get inherited. So does what comes after them.

I close my eyes.

For ten days I've been asking people for that one word. My mother had it. My mother sat at a kitchen table with a dying pen and decided I was safer without it.

"Every single person," I say. "Every single person in my life has made this exact call."

"I know."

"You did too."

"I know."

He says it without flinching and without apologizing, and I love him a little for that, which is something I’m not looking at directly this week.

My phone lights up on the counter above us. Lila. Her last message, still unopened, and a new one stacked under it.

I turn the phone face down.

The photograph is loose between two pages near the back.

Stiff card, scalloped at the edges, gone the color of weak tea. A studio stamp on the reverse with a town name I don't know and no date anywhere on it.

A young woman. Dark hair pinned back. High collar buttoned to the throat, hands folded in her lap the way they made people fold them.