I sent the guy home. I sat down right there on the plywood and I opened it.

The first page said, “September 4, 2012. Today I told Mom.”

Forty-three pages. Dates. Times. Every single thing Rick did, written down in the careful, scared print of a girl trying to make a record nobody could call her crazy for.

She’d been keeping it for months before she ever came to me. One line I read four times before I could breathe. She wrote down something he’d told her. “He said if I tell her, she’ll choose him. He said she always does.”

She knew. Before she ever stood shaking in my kitchen, she already knew what I’d pick. She came to me anyway. That’s the part that finishes me off. She gave me the chance even though she’d already done the math on her own mother.

I read every page on my knees in that dust. And then I got to the last entry, the one she wrote the morning she left, the morning she climbed up here and hid this thing in the wall.

“I’m putting this journal in the attic because someday Mom will find it. And when she does, she’ll know she had a choice. She chose wrong.”

That’s it. That’s the last thing she wrote in this house.

I’m still sitting up here. The insulation’s still torn out and the contractor’s been texting me about rescheduling and I haven’t answered him. I keep thinking I’ll call her. I keep picking up my phone and putting it back down. Because the truth is she didn’t hide this so I’d find it and we’d hug and cry and fix it. She hid it so that one day, long after she was gone and safe and grown, I’d finally have to read in her own hand the answer she already had at fifteen.

She was right. I had a choice. And she’s the only one in this family who’s never once gotten it wrong.