I wrote it on the inside cover of the book by my chair, the way a girl writes her name in a book to say this is mine, I was here. Because that was the whole of it, really — I was saying I was here, to a life that had nearly let me pass through it without a trace.

Henrietta Cardiff was here.

She read by this window.

She taught your children, or your neighbor’s children, to turn marks into meaning.

She was not furniture, whatever the last chapter of her life had tried to make her, and she was going to sign her own true name to the little of the story that was left, in her own hand, while there was still a hand to hold the pen.

Chapter 12 — He Finds Me