I went to my mother's rooms again on a quiet afternoon two weeks after the council's judgment.
Cora walked with me this time rather than waiting outside. She said she thought I might want company for the harder parts, and she was right in a way I had not fully anticipated until I was sitting again at that writing table with the rain long gone and clear afternoon light replacing it.
I took down the journals from the shelf, three of them, and began where the first one started, working through her handwriting slowly, my mother's voice becoming clearer to me with every page.
She had been ordinary in the ways that mattered most. She worried about small things alongside the large ones. She wrote about a dress she liked and a friend she had disagreed with and, later, about my father, in langua
