Mara went into the Salted Page looking for a birthday card and came out with something she could not explain.
The shop smelled of cedar and dried thyme. It was narrower than the others on the lane, wedged between a fishmonger whose window glittered with mackerel and a bookbinder whose shutters had not been raised in years. Behind the counter, a woman in a linen apron watched her without seeming to.
The cards were fine. Mara held three of them, then put them down, because her eye had been caught by a leather notebook on a back shelf. It was not the kind of thing she usually wanted. But her hand went to it the way her hand went to a switched-on lamp in a dark room, and when she lifted it the leather was warm, as though it had been waiting in a sunbeam.
She carried it to the counter.
"Eight pounds," the apothecary said. Then, without Mara asking, without Mara even meeting her eye: "It will keep you honest."
Mara paid. She did not ask what the woman meant. She walked home with the notebook under her arm and the strange phrase tucked behind her teeth, where it would not dissolve.
The flat above the bakery smelled of bread that had finished baking two hours ago. Daniel was at the kitchen table with his laptop and a cold cup of tea.
"What did you get?" he said.
"Nothing," Mara said, and set the notebook down.
She opened it at the kitchen table once Daniel had gone to bed. The pages were blank. She closed it. She went to sleep.
In the morning, her Tuesday was there.
The first line was dated. The second said she would wake at 6:47, before her alarm, because the man below was loading the oven early. She had. The third line described the coffee she would spill on the counter, the stain shaped like a comma. It had dried by the sink. The fourth line said she would miss the 7:15 bus by eleven seconds and catch the 7:30 instead. Mara looked at her phone. She had missed it by eleven seconds. The fifth line mentioned a phone call she would not make to her mother. She had picked up the phone, then put it down. The sixth line described a seagull on the bakery awning, a left foot tucked under its body. Mara went to the window. The seagull was there. The left foot was tucked.
She read to the bottom of the page. Then she turned it. The back of the page was the same cream as the front, unmarked. She lifted the cover, expecting instructions, a colophon, an imprint. There was nothing. She tilted the notebook toward the window and watched the light slide across the paper. The ink did not shine; it sat in the grain the way any ink did. She put her nose to it. It smelled faintly of iron, faintly of dust, faintly of something she could not name and did not want to. She touched the first letter with the pad of her thumb. It was dry. She counted the lines. There were sixty-three.
At Daniel's kettle she waited until it clicked and then counted again. Still sixty-three.
She did not write anything in the margins. She did not want to see if the notebook would write back.
She read the rest standing up. She did not sit down again until she had finished.
Daniel found her at the table with the notebook open and her hands flat on either side of it.
"Prove it," he said, and laughed, because laughter was what Daniel did when he did not want to be afraid.