Chapter 6: The Notebook
Grandma's house smelled like the same things it had always smelled like — coffee and cedar and something baking that I could never identify.
I had spent whole summers there when I was small, before Karen, and walking through the front door that evening felt like putting on a coat I thought I'd lost.
She sat me at the kitchen table with hot chocolate and didn't ask me anything.
Dad sat across from her with a mug of coffee he didn't drink.
After a while, she got up and went to the drawer beside the refrigerator — the one she kept her important papers in — and she set a small spiral notebook on the table between them.
It was green.
The cover was worn at the corner.
"I started it after the second call," she said.
"I didn't know what I was going to do with it.
I just knew I needed to write it down."
Dad opened it.
I watched his face as he read.
He didn't read fast.
He went slowly, page by page, and his expression didn't change much — just got quieter and quieter, the way a room gets quiet when the temperature drops.
"October fourteenth," he said.
"Yes."
"He called you at nine-forty-seven."
"He was crying.
It took me a few minutes to understand what he was saying."
Dad turned a page.
"November second."
"She'd told him he couldn't go to Tommy Aldrich's birthday party because he'd left a cup on the counter.
He called me from under his bed." She paused.
"He whispered the whole time.
Forty minutes.
He was afraid she'd hear him."
Dad set the notebook down.
He pressed both hands flat on the table and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
"Why didn't you call me?" he asked.
Not angry.
Just — asking.
"I tried.
Three times.
You didn't answer."
He closed his eyes.
"I was traveling.
I was always—" He stopped.
"I was always traveling."
"Yes," Grandma said simply.
The kitchen was very quiet.
I had finished my hot chocolate.
I didn't ask for more.
I sat very still because I had the feeling that what was happening in this room was important in a way that I wouldn't fully understand until much later.
"There's something else," Grandma said.
She reached into the same drawer and set a second piece of paper on the table.
Not from the notebook — a folded sheet of regular paper, the kind from a printer.
"He sent me an email," she said.
"From school.
Three weeks ago."
Dad looked up.
"He has an email account?"
"His teacher set them up for a project.
He used the school computer at lunch." She nodded toward me.
"He didn't tell you because he was afraid the email would show up somewhere Karen could see it."
Dad unfolded the paper.
I remembered writing that email.
I had typed very slowly because I wasn't fast yet and I'd had to use the dictionary for two words.
I had read it over four times before I sent it.
It said: *Grandma I need you to save the notebook.
Don't throw it away.
I think we might need it someday.*
Dad read it twice.
Then he folded it back along the same creases and held it in both hands and didn't say anything for a long time.
"He's seven," he finally said.
"He's been managing this alone for a long time," Grandma said.
"He learned to be careful.
He learned to plan." She looked at me with an expression I didn't have a word for yet.
"He's his mother's son."
Dad made that sound again — the one from the night before.
The quiet breaking sound.
He got up from the table and came around to my side and crouched down the way he had in the living room with the officers, so we were eye to eye.
"I'm sorry, Ethan," he said.
"I'm sorry I wasn't paying attention."
I didn't know what to say.
So I just nodded.
He pulled me into a hug that lasted a long time.
Over his shoulder, I could see Grandma watching us.
She had her hand pressed flat against her chest, just below her collarbone.
She was smiling.
But her eyes were wet.
That night, after Dad had made calls and Grandma had made dinner and I had been put to bed in the room that still had my drawings taped to the wall from two summers ago, I lay in the dark and held my mother's phone.
The screen lit up when I pressed the button.
Low battery.
Four percent.
May you like
I held it until the screen went dark.
Then I held it anyway.
