Chapter 4 · free to read
That was the fourth time I nearly put the pages down and walked back to my grandmother's house. I have kept count since the platform. I still don't know why I keep count.
She had known who I was since the morning I walked into her shop. She had waited three weeks for me to ask her one question, and I had spent those three weeks buying second-hand paperbacks off her instead.
Forty years of other people's unfinished sentences, tied in bundles with kitchen string. Nine of the bundles were from one year. I have never asked her which year.
Twenty-two words. For three years I had not been able to hold on to more than seven of them, and I had told myself that was ordinary.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.