She unhinges the gate and sees her mother at the end of the street, walking home from work. The notebook feels rough against her skin, urging Sasha to right the injustice of confining her uncle’s war journal to a place with old shoes and mice, to right the dishonor, yet she knows that her mother could be the one who put it there.

She starts walking toward her, not ready to confront her yet. As the two of them approach each other, Sasha decides not to say anything about the war journal, to keep quiet. She pretends that she is simply strolling in her mother’s direction to help her carry a string bag with potatoes because she is almost eleven, old enough to know what would happen if she pulled the notebook from under her sweater.

Her mother’s smile would be instantly wiped off her face. “What is this?” she would ask, stopping and lowering the string bag to the ground.

“You know what it is,” Sasha would say theatrically. “Why was it in the storage loft, behind all that forgotten junk?”

“Let’s go home,” her mother would respond in her teacher’s voice, her eyes fixed on the notebook in Sasha’s hand, as if she were trying to melt it down to nothing with her gaze, to make it disappear from the vision of the neighbors peeking through the openings in the fence.

In the house, her mother would shut the front door and double lock it behind them.

“Who asked you to climb into the storage loft and nose around there?” Her voice would be metallic, moving up the scales. “It’s not for you or anyone else. There is a reason why it has been hidden.” Her nostrils would flare, and her eyebrows would mash together, her ire approaching the thunderous heights of Grandpa’s.

“You just don’t understand how dangerous it would be if anyone read it. You have no idea what they could do to our family,” her mother would shout.

“But this is what he saw at the front,” Sasha would yell back. “This is what really happened. He didn’t make it up. He was there. This is the truth!” She would stab the air with the notebook to punctuate her words.

Her mother, in Sasha’s imagination, would shake her head, as if to rid her mind of the nonsense her daughter had just uttered. “This is what you don’t understand,” she would say, forcing each word into the air through tightened lips. “This is exactly why this journal is so dangerous for the family. The truth that Kolya saw.”

In the kitchen, Sasha’s mother, now real, dumps the potatoes into a copper pot she uses to make jams, ladles water from the bucket to rinse them, and snatches an apron off a nail on the wall.