Margot tried to turn the page, but the leaves were fused together and threatened to tear. She crossed to the cutlery drawer and brought out a butter knife. Moving in tentative, delicate increments, she eased the knife between the first two pages and slowly peeled them apart.

The words were written in ink. A date was written in the upper-right corner, smudged until she couldn’t make out any distinct numbers. The lettering was strange—neat but convoluted and heavily slanted, and though letters stood out to her, the words weren’t easily read. Blotches of stray ink had flicked across the margins, leaving permanent stains on the pages.

Margot rubbed her fingers at the back of her neck as she struggled to make out the first sentence. “Today is the…fifth? Firtt? No—wait—”

Firſt. The writer was using an elongated ſ in place of s. The book was very, very old.

“The first day of summer,” Margot read haltingly. She felt like she was a child again, spelling out the letters as she tried to understand the words. “God’s bleffing…blessing…follows us, joy be given. Papa fays…says…I shall have a governess like the girls in the city. He gave me this book for my thoughts. I shall call it my Summer Book…”

Margot bent low over the table, deciphering the words in painstaking increments, occasionally sliding the knife between pages to pry them free. The journal seemed to belong to a young teen. She spoke about her brothers bickering in the field, and wanting to wear a new dress to the town dance. About a friend she made, and then the heartbreak when she found out that friend spoke coldly of her behind her back. The boys she liked. The new plants that went into the home’s garden. The way the cook joked with her and gave her treats.

The progress was slow, but Margot found it nearly impossible to put down. The long S speckled through the pages meant that the journal had been written sometime in the late seventeen hundreds. That would place it as belonging to a child or a grandchild of the first-generation Hulls. Whether from Ezra or Ephraim’s line, she couldn’t tell. The unknown girl hadn’t signed the book. Except for the first page’s numbers, which were unreadable, she hadn’t dated any of the entries, only occasionally noting that it was a Tueſday or the ſeventh or that harvest had begun to arrive for that season’s wine.

Margot was less than a third of the way through the book when she finally stopped and stretched back in her chair. Joints in her spine popped as they released, and she let out a slow, groaning sigh. Her eyes burned. When she touched her phone, she was surprised to see it was after midnight.