“She just liked a date.”

And I said something about whether the napkins had meant anything.

And Deloris Pfaff said: “They meant she’d been thinking about you long enough to thread a needle.”

Part Twelve: Restricted

The last page of the book has a stamp across it in red ink.

Most of the colour had gone.

I had looked at it four or five times in the first week and had got nothing out of it except that it was a stamp, which meant it had been applied in the branch by somebody official, which meant it was the only mark in that entire book not made by my grandmother’s hand.

I finally read it on the twenty-ninth of October, in my car, outside the bank, by holding the page up against the windscreen with the afternoon sun behind it.