Brent had heard her, and he saw her, at least for a little while. He’d opened up his world and invited her in, and so what more could she do but come in and curl up near that promised fire of comfort. He even encouraged her to apply to college, but soon she recognized how foolish to really think magic could happen to someone like her. How does the fish feel when it grabs a shiny bit of lunch and finds itself hooked and dragged into a place it can’t breathe?

Still, it was good in the beginning, and she was hopeful. She took a course at the community college and really sharpened her shorthand skills, discovering how easily it all came to her, as if this was her first language and she just never knew. But now, the tribe speaking her language, those quiet people tucked away in offices and courtrooms, are dying out, replaced by recording equipment, keyboards, and masks. Some might say it’s a dying language, but she thinks it’s an art like cursive; she and Brent often wrote things in cursive so Jason couldn’t read their love notes. Now it’s Harvey who studies the loops and swirls of things that come in the mail and asks her to read them. Harvey says her shorthand looks like a little bird got ink on its feet and did a dance.

Shelley once met a woman whose first language was American Sign Language; the child of two deaf parents, this woman grew up watching her parents’ fingers—I love you, sweetie pie, beddy-bye time—those were the examples the woman had used, phrases that Shelley had later used with Jason and Harvey, so lovely and sweet and lyrical, that had never been called out to her.

Sometimes Shelley traces things like I love you, sweetie pie and beddy-bye time on Harvey’s back as she waits for him to fall asleep. Sweetie pie. Sometimes in cursive and sometimes in print. So he can try and feel the letters, get the message.

The first time Shelley ever saw Brent, he reminded her a little of Jason’s dad, though of course she never would have said that, and how strange to even figure out how to say it or why it was, one man white and one man dark, one man middle-aged and one man young. One beefy and one painfully thin. Still there was something in the eyes that pulled her in. It really came down to kindness in their eyes, at least in the beginning. No one ever wants to be compared, even though it seems people are often attracted to similarities—voices, gestures—some part responding to something, maybe something really old, the same way they say a baby hears things before it’s born.