I’ve always known I’m different. Grandmother gave me this journal because she knows this also—she knows how it feels. She told me I can “write” my life in here. She said that every New Year’s Eve I can write everything I want for my next year.

Mother’s twelve-year-old handwriting was loopy and crooked, sometimes hearts for dots above the i’s. I held within my hands my mother’s entire life journey beginning at twelve years old.

There were other items stashed in the back of the journal, and I lifted them in a detached, bemused way, as if I had been given permission to wade through the stars or breathe underwater. There was a drawing I’d made at nine years old; a torn piece of a letter with what looked like a poem; an envelope yellowed and crackling with Mother’s address; another letter, but this one in Mother’s handwriting, folded and inside an unsent and unaddressed envelope.

I had lost her to gain her.

I lay flat on my back, staring up at the ceiling of my parents’ bedroom with a crystal chandelier above my head. I wanted to call Hutch and whisper, “I found a secret piece of my mother.” But I didn’t call him. Of course I didn’t.

Mother’s journal was under my left hand, and although I heard Dad’s footsteps, I didn’t move. He stood over me. “Ellie, are you okay?” I nodded, or I thought I nodded, but there was no movement. “Ladybug, are you okay?”

“Did you know Mother kept a journal of her entire life?” I turned my head to look at him.

“I suspected.” He took my hand and pulled me to sit.

“What does that mean?”

“Well, every New Year’s Eve she would write in that book”—he pointed to it—“in the same spot at the top of the stairs in that nook, and then she’d lock it back up. She only skipped once. It was why we never went out on New Year’s. She made me promise in life or death that I would never read it. I promised.”

“You didn’t promise for me, did you?” I asked.

“No.” He shook his head, looking away. “I don’t think I could read it anyway. It’s too much to have lost her. I can’t …” He stopped.

“Can’t what? Get to know her more?”

He looked back at me with this pain I’d never seen etched around his eyes. “She allowed me to know all of her she chose to let me know. That was all I needed, Ellie.”

“It wasn’t enough for me,” I said, my fingers closing around the journal.

“Is anything?” he asked, his hands held out in supplication.

“I hope so, Dad.”

Silence filled the space between us until I asked, “How was golf?”

“Fine,” he said.