She holds it against her chest. “I promised to give it to you one day, didn’t I?”

I swallow past the tight grasp of my throat. How does she remember telling me that but not remember how to use the dishwasher?

“Yes.”

“Did you take it to help me?” She flips through, stopping to read one section more thoroughly.

“I took it before you started telling me your stories,” I try to explain, but it sounds lame even to my own ears. “I wanted to help with your memory. I thought… It doesn’t matter what I thought.”

“You thought if you could find the bad memory I was trying so hard to forget, that it would help me, yes?” She looks up from the journal, the tired droop of her eyelid nearly covering her eye.

“I did.”

Gram smiles gently. “I know you worry about me,” she says. “I promised Yakov that I would go see a real doctor this time. He is making me an appointment with someone he knows who is a specialist with this kind of thing.”

Click. The air shimmers with a memory of Gram taking me to the hospital. I had croup. Each breath was such an effort, it was like breathing through a heavy blanket. Gram kept me calm, made sure I took my medicine, sang me songs until I finally fell asleep in a steam of cold air permeating my lungs. She never left me alone.

“I’ll go with you,” I say, blinking past my tears. Logically, I know tears are a hormonal response from my endocrine system. Knowing this still doesn’t stop them from overflowing.

Gram takes my face in her hands. “Oh, my sweet girl. You have been worried. I’m so sorry you’ve carried this for so long. I think you must have questions for me?”

I sniff and wipe my face with the palm of my hand. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth about your dad?”

She drops her hands to her sides and sighs. “It seemed easier to tell you about it if it wasn’t about me. I didn’t want you to think of me sad or in danger. I didn’t want to scare you.”

I snort.

Gram nods with a small, worried smile. “Yes, I can see now that all I did was scare you. By keeping things from you, I’ve made it worse. But I think that for many years I lied to myself, too. To keep safe—to not think about those horrible times—I pretended it had happened to Jacob. Even in my journal I said it was Jacob’s papa. I said it so much, I started to believe it.”

“You believed your own lie?” I ask, eyes wide.

Gram nods. “If I believed it, then it wasn’t a lie, you see?”

I think about this. How we can even lie to ourselves.