What Grew Back
In September, three things happened.
The first: Esme's grandfather died. It was very gentle. He had a quiet stroke in his armchair, in the late-summer light, with a cup of cold tea in his hand. He did not, the doctor said, suffer. Esme had been with him an hour before. They had been finishing the second notebook. Esme had been reading him back, aloud, what they had written.
She thought, for a long time afterwards, that this was the right ending. He had been telling her things all summer. She had been writing them down. He had — in the end — heard them read back. He had, before he died, known that what he had told her had been received.
Esme cried for two days. Then, with her parents' permission, she carried on with the second notebook for him. She had decided, she told her mother, that the notebook was not finished. Her grandfather had been telling her not just about him, but about an entire generation. The notebook needed a final section that he had not, before he died, dictated. She would, she said, write that section herself, from what he had told her.
She called the section *What He Wanted Me To Know.*
It said:
*My grandfather wanted me to know that the old world had, in some ways, been better. People had been able to travel. People had been able to communicate across vast distances. There had been libraries with millions of books. There had been hospitals that could