No child should ever have to open that particular door, to read that particular book.

And Caleb had opened it, and read it, and carried what he found there entirely alone, and the sight of that leather journal on a diner prep table told me, before anyone said a word, that my son had walked much further into the dark than I had ever imagined a boy his age could go.

My late husband had kept it through his illness, a careful record of appointments and medications and questions for the doctors, in his own handwriting.

I had not seen it in three years.