“These are the ones,” Bernard confirmed. “The ones I transcribed when I was in high school.” No acknowledgment of what she had done, Sissy thought. No word of thanks, although without her, Savery’s wife would have burned everything he’d left behind.

“I remember seeing the originals,” Miss Atkins said, bending over the pages. “When I was a girl.” She reached out but then politely turned to Sissy, who had preserved them. “May I look?”

“Of course,” Sissy said. The teacher read a few pages, doubled back and seemed to read some lines again; put her hand to the tidy braid coiled at the back of her head. Sissy, reflexively smoothing her own faded frizz, said, “What is it?”

“Just—” Her gaze slid from Sissy to Bernard. “I thought I remembered these very well, but Izzy plays more of a role than I thought, and has more opinions about the generals’ orders. And here, where he talks about Vic and his work with the observation balloons—I didn’t think Izzy knew much about that. I hate to see that I’ve forgotten what he wrote.”

“Really,” Bernard said, turning toward her, “I don’t think you misremember much.”

“It’s a long time ago,” she said, shaking her head. “But still—I thought I was paying better attention.”

Bernard picked at the loose paint on Sissy’s chair, letting flakes fall to the floor while Sissy’s thoughts rearranged themselves. The originals, Miss Atkins had said. I thought I remembered. This middle-aged schoolteacher who stood so erectly, whose skirt betrayed deep and unladylike pockets inserted along the seams—the corner of a notebook peeped from one—and who seemed not quite to notice her, must once have been the girl who had sometimes held the pen for Izzy’s brother.

“I might have—I did—change a few things, when I was transcribing them,” Bernard said. “To make a better story, to make Izzy feel better; and maybe so that when the history was published Vic would feel like he could come home. I didn’t know the book wouldn’t get written.”

“Yet,” Sissy protested. Savery had never been able to track Vic down in Canada, although he’d been mentioned in the letters of several men from the regiment. “It’s not written yet. My brother didn’t choose to die.”

Miss Atkins, still ignoring Sissy, traced the parentheses dotting the pages like fallen eyelashes. “You mean these?” she asked Bernard.

“Corrections,” he admitted—causing the little mechanism in Sissy, which weighed and measured the content of various letters, to spring up alertly. She’d assumed that the many parenthetical phrases reflected the habits of Izzy’s mind (his hesitations, his qualifications), just as Savery’s frequent dashes and ampersands expressed his vibrant haste.