Dr. Murray smiled and looked briefly at Da.

“It is an A word, thankfully. Shall we look it up?” He went to the shelf behind his desk and got down A and B.

When my twelfth birthday card from Ditte arrived, it contained a slip of paper. A word that Ditte said was superfluous to need.

“What does superfluous mean?” I asked Da as he put on his hat.

“Unnecessary,” he said. “Not wanted or needed.”

I looked at the slip. It was a B word: Brown. Bland and boring, I thought. Not lost or neglected or forgotten, just superfluous. Da must have told Ditte I’d taken a word. I put hers in my pocket.

I thought about it all day at school. I let my fingers play with the slip’s edges and imagined it a more interesting word. I considered throwing it away, but couldn’t. Superfluous, Ditte had said. Maybe I could add that to the list of rules Lizzie had insisted on.

When I arrived at Sunnyside in the afternoon, I went straight up to Lizzie’s room. She wasn’t there, but she wouldn’t mind me waiting. I pulled the trunk from under her bed and opened it.

She arrived just as I was getting the slip out of my pocket.

“It’s from Ditte,” I said quickly, to stop her frown from deepening. “She sent it for my birthday.”

Lizzie’s frown began to fall away, but then something caught her eye. Her face froze. I followed her gaze and saw the rough letters scratched inside the lid of the trunk. I remembered my anger, blind and selfish. When I turned back to Lizzie, a tear was sliding down her cheek.

It felt like a gas balloon was expanding in my chest, squashing all the bits I needed to breathe and speak. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I thought, but nothing came out. She went to her bedside table and picked up the pin.

“Why?” she asked.

Still, no words. Nothing that would make sense.

“What does it even say?” Her voice teetered between rage and disappointment. I hoped for rage. Harsh words against bad behaviour. A storm then calm.

“The Dictionary of Lost Words,” I mumbled, not raising my eyes from a knot in one of the floorboards.

“The dictionary of stolen words, more like.”

My head snapped up. Lizzie was looking at the pin as if she might see something in it that she hadn’t seen before. Her lower lip quivered, like a child’s. When our eyes met, her face collapsed. It was the same look that Da had the day I was caught, as if she’d learned something new about me and didn’t like it. Not rage, then. Disappointment.

“They’s just words, Esme.” Lizzie held out her hand to pull me up off the floor. She made me sit on the bed beside her. I sat rigid.