The Torn Page

I didn't call Gideon Pruitt. I called my mother instead, at six in the morning, and asked her where Grandma Odalys's box had gone after the funeral.

"Attic," she said. "Why on earth—"

I was already in the car.

The box was exactly where memory said it would be, water-stained cardboard, my grandmother's handwriting gone soft with age across the lid: Agatha's things. Inside: a christening gown yellowed to cream, a hairbrush missing half its bristles, and at the bottom, wrapped in a linen handkerchief, a small book with a cracked leather cover.

Agatha's diary. I had known it existed the way you know a story exists — as something told, not something held. I had never actually opened it.

Most of the early pages were domestic and small: linens aired, silver polished, a description of a garden party that ran three sentences long. Then, near the back, the handwriting changed. Tighter. Faster.

The boy flinched today when Mr. Thorncastle raised his voice, not just his hand, and I have seen that flinch before on children who have reason for it. I said nothing. I am only a maid and maids who say things are not kept on.

Two pages later:

I saw what he does to the boy when the door is shut. I will not stay silent, whatever it costs me. Tomorrow I mean to speak to —

The sentence didn't end. It couldn't. The next page had been cut out of the binding with something sharp and careful, close to the spine, leaving nothing behind but a clean pale scar of missing paper.

Someone had removed it on purpose. And whoever had done it had wanted it gone completely — not torn out in anger, but excised, the way you remove evidence you intend no one to ever find.