An updated version of InDesign shoves its new features onto my screen with a pop-up sporting an image of a bird whose acid-trip tail brags about their clever design chops (so, if I take the virtual tour, I’ll be able to design a similarly magnificent creature!). It’s the kind of window you feel like you have to deal with because the option to skip this step is tiny and faint, a dweeby kid cowering in a corner of the window. So I bite and click through the whole intro-tour of the updated interface until Mrs. Tyburn comes in with her revisions to Sophia’s diary, much of it just squiggles and symbols and shorthand, and goes out again to a more charming part of the house. Mostly I understand what the symbols mean from context. But there’s one I have to look up. Stet, verb—let it stand. In a proof a revision that should be ignored, like crossing out a crossing out. Let it remain. Stet, stet. I like it. It hits hard enough to hurt a little but not too bad. It makes an impact.

I look at more of the search hits and find out that there’s a book called Stet by some lady who used to be a book editor, and I consider ordering it, but that’ll take a month and I’ll be gone by then for sure. I wonder if it means the same thing to her that it means to me, if it’s one of those really sad words for her too. Of course she edited books and I edit some old lady’s fucked-up life. Still, I imagine reading it and emailing her to tell her what I think. Maybe she’d write me back. I have really stupid ideas sometimes.

Stet. The more I repeat it in my head, the more desperate it makes me feel. I can’t stop saying it, though. Let it remain. Like a prayer, short and kind of pathetic, because it doesn’t matter what you say or do; whatever’s going to happen is going to happen no matter what. There’s no magic. That’s what made me feel so shitty about it, this stet. Mrs. Tyburn can get me to fix her life and change her family and make it look like everybody loves her because she has the money to pay me to do it. But I can’t do it for myself, my family, my life. I’ll say stet when things feel really awful, if only to be cruel to myself. Stet, I say, I ask, I beg. Only, I’ll never be able to instruct like she does. I’ll never be able to make anything stay.