I’m torn by emotion—amusement that she found her mother’s diary so boring, grief that she’ll never get to see her mother again. I wonder if I’m supposed to chastise her for reading something she clearly shouldn’t. “Maybe that’s what makes it grown-up stuff,” I say lightly. “Only grown-ups like it. And only kids like kid stuff.”

She considers this. “But you’re a grown-up, and you like my stuff. Don’t you?”

I didn’t like it when Beau Rochester called me young and naive. I didn’t particularly like it when Mateo Garza called me innocent, either. Maybe every nineteen-year-old woman wants to seem older. We can vote and have sex. We can enlist in the military. In so many ways we are grown, but in other ways we aren’t. “Maybe I’m in between,” I say, which is a big concession. I have all the responsibilities of being a grown-up, but I have the desire to play. “And I do love our games. Painting and taking walks in the woods. I think I’m even getting better at Monopoly.”

She giggles. “I can still beat you though.”

“That’s probably true,” I concede. “What should we do for the rest of the day?”

It’s Saturday, so we don’t have to do more schoolwork. Even though there’s still a backlog of worksheets from before I came here, I like to give her time off to rest and recharge.

Her head leans back on my forearm. I’m touched by the gentle trust she shows in me.

“I dunno. Maybe we could write in our diaries. Do you have one?”

“No,” I say, drawing the word out. “But if I had one, you definitely couldn’t read it.”

She sticks her tongue out. Then she gets serious. “I don’t know. Maybe Mommy did think someone would read her diary. She said that she thought someone would hurt her.”

Goose bumps run over my skin. I have to work hard to keep my expression neutral. I’ve seen too much domestic violence in my life to pretend like this is nothing. “Did someone hurt you?”

Her gray eyes are solemn. She shakes her head without breaking our gaze. “But I wasn’t with her when she died. What if someone did hurt her?”

My breath catches. All I know about her parents’ deaths is the one article. A boating accident, it said. Could a boating accident have happened on purpose? Then why would they both have died? “I don’t know. We could ask Uncle Beau about it. I’m sure he knows what happened.”

“No way,” she says. “I tried talking to him, and he told me I was wrong.”