The Daughter They Sacrificed Chose a New Life novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Slice

I showed my professor the page on Friday morning, standing at her kitchen counter with the coffee going cold.

She read the back twice, then turned it over and looked at the front for a long time.

"Your grandmother drew this fast," she said. "She left half of it unfinished."

"Do you know what she meant? What she saw?"

"No." She gave it back to me, carefully, by the corners. "But she wrote it down and hid it, and that tells me she didn't trust the person who'd find it first."

"I should ask Dad."

"You should do nothing today," she said. "Today you have an opening to get through. Put it somewhere safe and eat something."

I slid the page into my own sketchbook, between two sheets of tracing paper, and closed it.

The show was loud and crowded and hot.

Two of my drawings hung in the back hall, between a welded horse and a wall of pressed leaves, and a woman I'd never met stood in front of them for ten minutes.

She asked who had drawn them.

My professor said, "A student of mine," in a voice that made my whole chest tight.

Afterward she took everyone home with her.

There were ten of us at the long kitchen table, and she had put eighteen candles in a lemon cake.

It was lemon again, because I had finished the airport slice down to the crumbs.

"You ate that first one like it was evidence," she told me. "I took notes."

The candles were crooked, and she lit them with a long match while a girl from the sculpture annex sang much too loudly.

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