Her heart quickens. She lifts the sketchbook, glancing nervously around her, and hurries to the bathroom down the hall, the narrow one at the back of the house where they keep their cleaning supplies in the bathtub, the one that no one ever uses. No one, she thinks, will find her here. She locks the door behind her and lowers the lid of the toilet to sit on. Her breath trembles as she looks at the sketchbook in her lap, running her fingers over it. She hesitates for just a minute before flipping the cover open. Going through Isabelle’s sketchbook, she thinks, is equivalent to reading someone’s diary, and she wants to be better than that. She doesn’t want to be the kind of mother who snoops and spies. At the same time, she thinks, this is different. This sketchbook is from a crucial time, from the time Isabelle first began to cultivate her silence, and it could contain clues. And Dr. Steingold, hadn’t he said that there was meaning in Isabelle’s art? That she was trying to communicate something by it? Furthermore, Ruth reasons, what was the sketchbook doing in the kitchen, wedged between two cookbooks, anyway? Her daughter is neat, organized; she would never lose track of a sketchbook, Ruth is sure. Maybe, Ruth thinks, maybe Isabelle planted the notebook in the kitchen for her mother to find. Maybe she put it there as some sort of cry for help. Maybe, Ruth thinks, she put it there months ago and has just been waiting for Ruth to find it. The thought that this sketchbook might have been sitting here under Ruth’s nose all along is maddening, and she takes a deep breath to calm herself before opening the thing up, almost afraid of what she’ll find inside.

On the first page is the picture of a branch, done from above, it seems, and up close. The bark is textured and peeling in spots, and from the crooked way the branch bends Ruth can tell that this branch is a limb of the apple tree, the one where Isabelle so often sits. Isabelle has drawn springtime shoots sprouting from the limb, and the fragile curl of leaves beginning to open. If the apple tree doesn’t make it through the winter, Ruth thinks, Isabelle will have captured its final spring right here.

Drawn on the next page is the corner of Isabelle’s desk in the city. There is a glass of water on the desk, and a ruler, and a small basket of worry dolls, and a hand—Isabelle’s own, Ruth can tell by the scar on the knuckle—sketching a drawing of Maggie. The drawing of Maggie within the drawing, it seems to Ruth, is as remarkable as the drawing itself, and she almost wishes that it stood alone—but, she thinks, looking again, there is something interesting about a drawing within a drawing.