The words blurred. I blinked, and they cleared.
For thirteen years, I’d carried the weight of being nineteen and unprepared to take on this role. I’d wondered all the time if I was doing anything right, if my father would be disappointed in how I’d handled things.
And he’d written all of this. Page after page of ordinary days and observations and love I hadn’t known how to look for.
My throat had gone so tight I could barely breathe. Emotion sat in my chest like it had been locked in a small room for too long and was now testing the walls.
I didn’t cry, but I came close.
I sat there for a while, stroking the pages of the journal, these chapters of my past I’d thought gone forever. I wasn’t sure how long I remained there, though the light streaming through the tree opening shifted. The sounds of Victoria moving and doingthings, plus the scratch of her pen on paper prodded me to look up.
I found her staring at me, watching with the careful attention she gave things she didn’t want to disturb.
The office didn’t feel like a tomb anymore but a place where my father had actually lived.
I closed the journal and left it on the desk in front of me. I wouldn’t return it to its place behind the carving again. I wanted it here, where I could reach for it. Where it belonged.
Victoria got up and dragged a stool over to the cabinet. She climbed on top of it and tried to reach the uppermost shelf in a cabinet, stretching up on her toes. Her fingers came just short of something pushed far back.
Rising, I went over and pulled down the small wooden box she was reaching for.
“You could’ve asked for help,” I said.
“This is how I work.” She hopped off the stool and took the box from me. “You’re not always here.”
“I’m here now.”
She glanced up at me, and I sensed she was deciding whether to argue. But she nodded and carried the box to her desk.
I pulled my father’s desk chair over near her and sat. This way I’d be close enough to reach the shelves and hand her things if she needed them.
Now she wouldn’t fall without me being here to catch her.
She slanted me a long look but didn’t comment. Just opened the box and started examining the contents that looked like old correspondence. Nothing relevant to what she was researching as far as I could tell.
We established a rhythm of her dictating observations into her notebook. Me occasionally handing her books from high shelves before she could climb up for them. Getting her tea whenher cup was empty. Adding wood to the fire when the room got cold.
She resisted my help at first, though in small ways. A slight frown when I refilled her tea. An “I can get that myself” when I reached for a book she was eyeing. But when the help was genuinely useful, like when I could get something she couldn’t or noticed she needed something before she had to ask, she accepted it.
Progress. I’d take it.
Acorn provided commentary throughout, short chirps and chittering sounds that Victoria would listen to, then translate with varying degrees of editing.
“What did he actually say?” I asked after one particularly pointed chirp.
“You don’t want to know,” Victoria said.
I raised an eyebrow.
She sighed. “He said you’re hovering like a mother wolf with only one pup.”
Acorn chittered again, sounding pleased with himself.
“And now he’s saying at least you’re not bringing me a half-rotten bird egg. Which he has done in the past.”
I looked at the squirrel. The squirrel looked at me.
“Tell him there will be no bird eggs inside this room, half-rotten or not,” I said.
