I sat for a long while without moving, rehearsing the scenes I had just read, the pages still clutched in my hand. So few pages and yet a world. And there was comfort in that world, for well I understood the profound distraction of Miss Grange’s mother and, too, the sister with her scrapbooks, pasting in the ticket the brother never used. As if the ticket might somehow signify the whole abysmal horror of their father’s sudden death. A ticket. The tears rolled down my cheek. And there in the room with them all was Papa. I could see him distinctly, the character was writ so true. There in her hands, my father walked and spoke in flashes I recognized; and reading him, having him so quietly to myself before me, was a heaven of a kind. Though I did not comprehend what she wished me to do with it, her diary gave me a great sufficiency, a gift indeed. Here were pages from a book that did not sit upon the shelves downstairs in my father’s house. Here, indeed, was a papa I never could have written on my own.

Was Papa—and then the very same characters as those in the wild gothic Miss Grange had told me last summer. Here was the mysterious cousin arrived, the elder sister, a brother (though here he was alive) and their troubled mother—with her drops. I shivered. Something in the creeping increments of those drops recorded recalled the smudges climbing up the fictive walls of Grange House. Were the drops real indeed, or just a bit of embellishment to aid the scene? But they must be real, I reflected. What was in my hands was a diary. I stopped short.

A diary. Was everything recounted here true, or merely true enough? And what did she mean by calling these “sketches” for a love story? A love story she imagined, or—

I stood up. A love story in truth? Papa had told me he knew nothing of Miss Grange. And there he was again, in my mind’s eye, saying it, seated across from me in the boat, and the oars stretched out into the calm harbor. Yet there was he now also, standing below Miss Grange upon a ladder, and smiling up into her face.