"Together?" I ask.
"Together."
There are dozens of them. The earliest is 1975; the last is from a few months before she died, the handwriting gone spidery and uncertain. We spread them across the bed and sit down among them, and we begin.
The early ones are ledgers, mostly. Harvest yields. Repairs. The cost of a new still. But threaded through the accounts, in the margins, is a woman slowly working something out.
1976: I think I have been lying to myself for a very long time. About what I want. About who I am. The world tells us there is one way to be a woman, one way to be happy. What if that way is simply wrong?
1979: A painter at the market today, up from Paris. She had paint on her fingers and she laughed at something the cheese seller said, and I felt something I have no name for. Something dangerous.
1980: Her name is Hélène.
"Oh," Cat says softly, and I hear her voice catch, and I reach over and find her hand without looking.
1981: She told me she loves me. I told her I love her too. I have never said those words to anyone and meant them. I did not know what they meant until now.
We read for hours. Cat passes me a notebook; I pass her another. The eighties unfold, then the nineties — two women quietlybuilding a life in a house at the edge of a village that decided, mostly, not to make it their business.
And then I turn a page and my grandmother is writing about me.
1995: My daughter looked at me like I was a stranger. Worse — like I was something spoiled. Something to be scraped off. She took my granddaughter and left without letting me say goodbye.
I have lost everything except Hélène. And Hélène says that is enough. But how can it be enough? Iris is five years old. She will not remember me. She will only ever know whatever poison her mother pours into her.
I should fight. I should hire lawyers, demand to see her, make them let me in. But I am afraid. Afraid of what the fight would cost. Afraid of what would be said about me in a courtroom, and what it would do to a small girl to hear it.
I am a coward. And my cowardice is going to cost me my granddaughter forever.
I read it three times.
Iris is five years old.
I put my hand flat on the page like an idiot, like I could reach through it. Somewhere in this house, in a room I've now slept in, a woman sat with a pen and grieved me while I was still alive. While I was three thousand miles away learning to make my bed with hospital corners so that my mother would look at me with something other than disappointment.
"She blamed herself," I say. My voice comes out wrecked. "The whole time. She thought it was her."
"So did I. For not coming back." Cat's thumb moves across my knuckles. "That's what silence does. Everyone in the story decides they're the one who failed."
I have to stop for a minute. Cat lets me.
Then she says, very evenly, "Keep going. I want to see her side."
Because she already knows what's coming. That's the thing I keep having to remind myself of — she read it a week ago, in her own bedroom, in her mother's own hand. What we're doing now isn't discovery. It's something harder. It's Cat going back to stand in the wreckage on purpose.
1988: She has named the baby Catherine. A beautiful name. I call her petit chat, because she has the curious eyes of a kitten — always watching, always wondering. Vivian says I spoil her. Perhaps I do. But after losing Iris, I cannot help wanting to hold onto this one.
Cat makes a small sound and doesn't say anything.
1992: Cat made ratatouille today, entirely alone. So proud of herself, up on that stool to reach the counter, stirring with such terrible concentration. She reminds me of myself at that age. Already in love with the kitchen. Already in love with making something out of nothing.
"I remember that stool," Cat says. Her eyes are wet and she is smiling and it is the saddest thing I have ever seen. "I remember thinking I was a genius."
"You were eight."
"I was agenius."
And then the one she's been waiting for.
