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And she isn't doing what everyone in old photographs does. She isn't looking politely past the camera.

She's looking straight into it. Seriously. Like she's the one deciding how long this takes.

"She's not my grandmother," I say. "She's older than that. Two generations. Maybe three."

Gage doesn't answer.

When I look up, he's gone the color of the frost on the window.

"Gage."

He puts one finger on the very edge of the card, careful, like the woman on it might mind.

"I've seen this face."

"Where?"

"Your kitchen." His jaw works. "The photograph out of that necklace. The one that was in the circle on your table. The one I burned in the salt."

The floor tilts a few degrees.

I was choked half to death by a chain in my own shop, and I stood inside a vision and watched a woman get dragged toward a fire, and she turned her head and looked at me. She said run. Then she said my name.

Same collar. Same hands. Same eyes.

"Why is she in my mother's book?"

Gage looks at the photograph for a long moment, then at the ledger, then out the window at nothing in particular.

"That's the question I'm taking to Evelyn," he says.

There are pages missing.

I find six, maybe seven, cut close to the gutter, tight against the stitching.

I run my thumb along the stubs.

Every other edge in this book has gone the color of tea. Every page in it has been sitting in a box under my mittens for three years, in the dust.

These edges are white.

Clean and pale and raw, the way paper looks in the second after it tears.

"Gage."

He's already there. He puts his face close to the spine and breathes in, and I watch his shoulders come down when it gives him nothing at all…again.

"Recently," he says.

"How recently?"

"Very."

Someone sat down with my mother's book, took the end of it out, and put it back under a folded green coat in a house nobody has walked into since Wednesday.

I turn back one page, to the last thing anybody wrote in here before the tear.

Four lines above the missing part, in a different pen. Blue, not black. Newer ink, thin and hard and pressed too deep.