Chapter 22: Lydia on the Stairs

I found Lydia on the stone steps at the edge of the garden, under a lamp that buzzed with moths.

Her shoes were off, set neatly side by side.

Her hair had come out of its pins, and she sat with her knees together and a gray notebook on her lap.

It was a twenty-second one, thinner than the others, and I had never seen it.

She did not look up.

I stopped two steps above her.

"You came," she said. "I didn't think you would."

"I want to tell you something."

"Please." She turned the notebook toward me. "Let me get it exactly right."

The pen was in her hand, the cap off.

The page in front of her was blank except for tonight's date.

For a moment I almost laughed.

Then it stopped being funny and was only sad.

"Put it down, Lydia."

"I can't."

"You can."

She looked at the pen in her hand.

"It's the only way I know to keep a person," she said again. "If I write it, you stay. Every day you said something, I had it, and it was mine."

"You didn't have me. You had a list."

"It was the same thing."

"It wasn't, and it never was."

She started to cry, quietly, without any of her old care for how it looked.

The soft voice was gone.

What was left was a small, frightened voice I had heard on the fence at six.

"I love you," she said. "I do, Dee. Nessa. I do. It's in every page, you can read it."

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