Paige, heart hammering, descended. At the bottom was a single room with a single shelf. On it sat one book, leather-bound and larger than a dictionary. The title was embossed in silver leaf: The Untold Stories of Paige Turner Nau.
It was sudden—an aneurysm that burst like an overripe berry. Paige inherited the small, cluttered house by the bluffs, the seven overstuffed bookcases, and a single, heavy key. paige turner nau
By dawn, the book was finished. The last page read: Paige Turner Nau went upstairs. She called her father and said, “I need to tell you about Mom. And also about a book I wrote once.” She did not delete this sentence. Paige, heart hammering, descended
Paige grew up surrounded by the scent of old paper and the quiet rustle of dust jackets. At sixteen, she could recommend a perfect book for any ailment: Jane Eyre for a broken heart, The Hobbit for a lost sense of adventure, Gatsby for disillusionment with the rich kids at school. But Paige herself had a problem she couldn’t solve. She was, as she put it, “tectonically shy.” She lived between pages, not among people. The title was embossed in silver leaf: The
Each page she read, she wept. And each page, after her tears dried, changed. The stories of her fear rewrote themselves into stories of her courage, however small.
The key was brass, old, and smelled of basement. She found it in a hollowed-out copy of The Secret Garden on her mother’s nightstand. Tied to it was a scrap of paper in Eleanor’s looping hand: For Paige Turner Nau. The last story.
The summer she turned twenty-four, her mother died.
