«The Book That Might...»

Ms. Alvarez, the art teacher, that same evening — after the halls had cleared, after the janitor had already started on the far wing. Three of your pieces were still pinned to the display board outside her room, left there because you'd been too embarrassed to take them down yourself, too embarrassed to leave them up either. She photographed all three on her phone before she left the building. Sent them, without telling you, to the citywide student exhibition the following week.

They made the shortlist. An invitation to the final round arrived at the school two weeks later, addressed to you — and got lost somewhere between the front office and the vice principal's desk, because by then you had already withdrawn from the art elective, and nobody left standing in that office had any idea whose name to attach the envelope to.

Jake stared at the date printed faintly in the corner of the page, doing math he didn't want to do. Then at another line, beneath it, that hadn't been in the vision at all — just a fact, stated the way the book seemed to state everything, without emphasis, without asking him to feel any particular way about it: Submissions for the same exhibition open again this week.

He stood in the empty hallway with the book in one hand and, for reasons he couldn't have explained to anyone, his backpack suddenly feeling ten pounds heavier than it had that morning, though nothing else was in it that hadn't been there before.

He thought about the folder on the kitchen table. Signed. Waiting.

He thought about the hatch in the hallway ceiling at home, the one that led up into the crawl space above the garage, the one he hadn't opened since he was thirteen because he'd stopped being able to reach the pull-cord without a boost he was too proud to ask for.

He went and found the janitor's supply closet, borrowed a stepladder without really asking, and carried it home slung over one shoulder the whole two miles, the book tucked under his other arm, already — though he told himself this was his imagination — a little heavier than it had been an hour ago.

What did you give up, the one time somebody laughed at you?

Chapter Four

Olivia Chen had built a career on other people's worst weeks — custody battles, contested wills, the particular civil war of divorce when there were children involved — and she had never once, in nine years of practice, lost her composure in front of a client.

She had lost it exactly once at her own father's funeral, and the person who'd seen it was her sister.

Three years now. Three years since Anna had stood over the casket, ashen and furious in the specific way grief makes people furious at the nearest available target, and said, in front of the minister, in front of an aunt who still brought it up at holidays neither of them attended anymore: You couldn't even show up on time. Did you even care about him when he was alive?

Olivia had not answered. She had a closing argument ready for nearly any accusation a person could level at her — it was, in some tired way, the whole of her professional skill — and she had stood there at her own father's funeral with nothing at all to say, because the accusation wasn't wrong, exactly, only aimed at the wrong reason.

She'd stopped by the used bookstore near her office that Thursday out of a habit she barely noticed anymore, the kind of errand you run on your feet without asking your brain for permission — coffee, dry cleaning, ten minutes browsing the dollar cart while she waited for a text back from a paralegal. She picked a book off the top of the discount stack without reading the spine, more out of politeness to the cashier, who'd spent five unhurried minutes helping the customer in front of her choose a birthday gift for someone's nephew, than out of any interest in owning it.

"Funny thing," the cashier said, ringing it up, not looking up from the register. "Some old fellow dropped that whole stack off first thing this morning. Told me not to charge much for them. Said someone would come along for the right one." She said it the way you'd repeat any small, forgettable oddity of a retail shift — not expecting it to mean anything, and it didn't, not until Olivia got it home.

The price sticker had been rubbed nearly blank, the numeral underneath illegible. Where a barcode should have been, there was instead a short string of digits that resolved, when she looked at it twice, into something that read less like a product code and more like a date — one too old to belong to any inventory system the shop could plausibly still be running.

She almost didn't open it that night. She had a deposition to prepare for, leftover pad thai she hadn't eaten yet, a bath she'd been meaning to take since Tuesday. The book sat on her counter through all of it, and she opened it, finally, close to midnight, mostly to have something to do with her hands while the tub filled.

It fell open somewhere past the middle, to a page that was — impossibly, precisely — the morning of her father's funeral.

Not the cemetery. Not the argument. Ninety minutes earlier: her own bathroom, the blouse she'd ironed twice though it hadn't needed it the first time, the shoebox of expired coupons and old receipts she'd sorted through at her kitchen table with a focus that made no sense for objects nobody would ever need again. She had told herself, for three years, that she'd simply lost track of time that morning. Grief did that. Everyone had told her so, kindly, more than once.

The book did not describe grief. It described fear — plain, specific, and entirely her own: the particular terror of walking into that room first, of being the one to see him in the casket before anyone else had absorbed the sight and made it, however slightly, more survivable to look at. She had not been late because she didn't care. She had been late because she was standing in her own bathroom, ironing a blouse that was already flat, trying to postpone the moment she would have to see her father's face and know, with her whole body, that it was really true.

She had never told anyone that. She had certainly never told Anna, who had needed, that morning, someone to be angry at more than she'd needed to be right.

The book kept going, into a room Olivia had never set foot in: an office she didn't recognize, a filing cabinet with a drawer she'd never opened, containing an envelope addressed, in her father's handwriting, to both his daughters. Together. Not separately. A line beneath it, in the same hand: Deliver only when they can sit at the same table again.

Her father had rewritten his will a month before he died. She had known that — the estate attorney had mentioned it in passing during probate, a routine addendum, nothing that had changed the substance of the division. She had not known about the letter. She had not known that whoever was holding it had been holding it, patiently, for three years, on the strength of an instruction that assumed she and Anna would eventually, on their own, find their way back to speaking.

She picked up her phone before she'd fully decided to. Not her sister — she wasn't ready for that, not at eleven-forty at night with her hands still faintly shaking — but the number for the notary who'd handled the estate, saved three years ago under a plain, forgettable "N" and never called since.

It rang twice.

"Olivia?" The voice was old, unhurried, warmer than she expected from a man she'd met exactly once, briefly, at a conference table full of paperwork. "This is Edmund Hale — I handled your father's estate. I have something for you and your sister. I've had it rather a long time." A pause, a beat too long to be nothing. "You sound like you've been carrying something heavier than usual this week."

Olivia went very still, standing in her kitchen with the bath running unheard in the next room. "What did you just say?"

"Only that these things weigh on people. I meant it generally." Another pause, and then, oddly, a question rather than an answer: "Have we spoken before, Ms. Olivia?"

"No," she said, slowly, hearing her own voice come out steadier than she felt. "But you already sound like you know exactly who you're talking to."

"Old habit," he said, and moved on before she could press it — gave her an address, a time, an apology for the delay that seemed, underneath its ordinary phrasing, to be an apology for something considerably larger than three years of a will sitting in a drawer.

She hung up with the specific, unsettling sensation of having been known by a stranger — not guessed at, not read, but known, thoroughly, the way you're known by someone who has already decided to care what happens to you — and no way to explain to herself why that frightened her more than it comforted her.

The bath had gone cold by the time she remembered it was running.

Who have you not spoken to for longer than you're willing to admit?

Chapter Five

Anna hated flying, which was inconvenient, given that her job required roughly one flight a month and this particular one — three days at a marketing conference in a hotel ballroom that smelled permanently of carpet cleaner — had been, by any objective measure, a waste of both.

She bought the book at her gate out of the specific, low-grade boredom of a delayed flight, from a kiosk she couldn't afterward have described in any detail beyond small and unmarked, the kind of cart that sold water and gum and phone chargers to people who'd forgotten theirs. She paid cash because the card reader was down. She didn't ask for a receipt.

She went back twenty minutes later, once boarding had been pushed a second time, meaning to ask the vendor for the title — there'd been no cover, and something about that had needled at her the way an unlabeled leftover in the fridge needled at her, a small unresolved thing she wanted closed. The cart wasn't there. Not closed, not relocated to another gate — simply absent, the space where it had stood now occupied by two empty chairs and a dropped boarding pass someone hadn't noticed yet.

"Carts rotate through on some schedule I've never managed to figure out," the guy at the neighboring newsstand told her, not looking up from restocking a rack of phone cases. "There's an old man who sits on the bench by gate 14, though. Always has a stack of books with him. Try him."

She didn't try him. Her flight was called before she could decide whether she wanted to.

She read on the plane, mostly to avoid the woman next to her, who had the specific, unstoppable friendliness of someone three drinks into a trip they were excited about, and it took her three separate attempts to actually fall asleep — book open in her lap, eyes closing, jerking back awake each time at some small turbulence or overhead announcement — before the page finally held her attention instead of just occupying her hands.

It was her father's funeral. Not the argument at the graveside, not Olivia's face going white and then furious. Earlier: the viewing, twenty minutes before anyone else arrived, Anna standing alone at the casket because the rest of the family — the aunts, the cousins, Olivia — were still stuck in some traffic none of them had planned around.