Chapter 63 · for subscribers
Four hundred and six names had gone down the columns of a shop ledger in wax pencil over fifty years, in the hand of a woman who walked a lane in the spring and asked a family for one daughter. Nine of them had been crossed through in red that morning and written in again at the bottom, and the hospital had read the crossings-out as a list of candidates. The book had never been a list of girls. It was a list of the mothers who had said yes.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.