Dad. Gone back to uni.

Need to be on my own for a while.

I’ve been reading a story. I don’t think Mum ever meant me to see it. I don’t know who it was for. Certainly not you. I felt like I was prying, even though it was lovely seeing her handwriting again.

Whether she wanted to or not, she told me the truth. Something you’ve never bothered to do. In fact, you decided to lie. You didn’t think about me, what I needed to know, what was right, and just, and how I would feel if I found out by accident that I’d been kept in the dark.

Anyway you’ll notice I’ve taken the “sand.” My sister needs to spend some time in the company of someone who honors her existence.

T. A.

I had put the little cedarwood chest on the bookshelf. When I go to look, I find that it has gone.

—

On my bed, carefully laid out, are three of Yvette’s notebooks. I pick up the one farthest to the left, L’Histoire, turn it over in my hands. A segment of the paper cover is a lighter blue, faded by a long-ago Egyptian sun. The shock has made me stupid. I riffle through the pages. Suddenly the language changes to English. The writing goes all the way to the end. I search the next notebook and the next. All of the leftover pages at the back are full, full with lines and lines of English prose in blue ink, in black, in Biro, and in felt pen. Underlinings. Stars. Tom has put the books in the right order: each passage is dated, all the dates in the first half of 1964.

She died in July of that year.

I open L’Histoire again and find my way back to the first English line.

He held my hand in the dust. That was the first time he touched me.

I lift my head, remembering her last July. The pale yellow sky, the boundless evening light. I have just broken into a private room, a small place wholly hers, still hers, no matter how long she’s been gone. Tom needn’t feel guilty. It wasn’t him she was hiding it from.

I turn once more to the page.

SEVENTEEN

Yvette

29 June 1964

Well now,” said Bridie, as I unwrapped a small bright-blue-and-yellow can with a screw top. “I don’t know that I’ve ever cooked with olive oil.”

She didn’t even like the idea of eating it, I could tell. She’d probably only seen it in the chemist’s. But this was one of six cans my mother had sent me from Nice, produce of the Alziari mill in Provence, wrapped in copies of Le Figaro. “Try some on a slice of this delicious bread of yours, Bridie, with a little salt and pepper. You won’t regret it.”