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"Maren."

"She died three years ago in March." I rub my thumb across my fingertip until the smudge is gone, and then I keep rubbing. "I picked the urn. I had a twenty minute argument with a man about the font on the plaque."

Gage sets the page down. He doesn't say anything.

"Go ahead and say it," I tell him. "someone's copying her hand."

"someone could be."

"But?"

"But someone came through a locked door in your house tonight, pulled one box to the middle of the floor, squared the lid up beside it, and didn’t take anything." The chair complains under him. "And I couldn't scent anything."

The flap in the back door claps. Sid comes through it damp to the shoulders, which is new, because Sid never goes out in bad weather.

He jumps to the table and studies the paper for a long moment.

It's the wrong question. His voice lands behind my eyes, dry as chalk.

Ask what wants you to read it.

Then he sits down on my mother's handwriting and starts washing his foot.

We wait for daylight, because I'm not opening my mother's things in the dark.

The candles burn down to stubs while we wait. Around five, one of them gutters out, and I look at the wick and try to revive it, the way I've tried a hundred times without thinking about it at all.

Nothing happens.

I look at it a while longer.

Then I get up, find the matches in the drawer beside the stove, and light it myself.

At seven the kitchen goes gray, Gage makes coffee, and I take the lid off the box.

Wool. That's the first thing. A green coat I wore when I was seventeen, a hat with a pom on it, two scarves, mittens with the tag still tied on. My winter things folded the way she folded, sleeves crossed over the chest like something laid out.

I don't remember packing this. I don't remember her packing it.

MAREN. WINTER. down the side in black marker, the same hand as the four words on the table.

"She kept my mittens."

"Yeah."

"I hadn't worn these in fifteen years and she washed them first. You can smell the soap."

Gage sets a mug down beside me and doesn't ask if I'm okay, which is the only reason I can keep going.

Under the coat there's a pillowcase, and inside the pillowcase there's a book.

A ledger. Marbled cover, cloth spine, a perished rubber band that snaps into two pieces when I lift it. Not a diary. My mother wasn't a diary person. She was a list person, a receipts-in-a-shoebox person, a woman who wrote milk on the back of an envelope and then lost the envelope.

The first date in it is eight months before I was born.

A girl, they tell me. I'm going to be careful with this one.

I sit down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets.