The Ledger of Stolen Years

Cora put her hand on the cold column, because she was an auditor and an auditor follows the discrepancy to its end no matter what it costs, and the vellum warmed under her palm, and the name bled up through the page in her own handwriting, which she had never written there. It was hers. The unnamed years were hers. Thirty years of them, deposited a fortnight at a time across a single childhood — the springs she could not remember, the birthdays that existed only as gaps in photographs where she was somehow always asleep, the long blank summer when she was six that her mother never spoke of. She had grown up feeling, always, that some part of her had been removed before she could miss it; she had called it temperament, called it being the kind of child who watched instead of played. It had a different name on the page. It had been *withdrawn.* "Your mother," the Reeve said, gently, and that gentleness was the cruelest thing in the hall, "came to us thirty years ago, with you in her arms and a husband in his last fever. She had nothing to trade but what she loved. So she sold us the years she could not yet see you living — the small ones, the early ones, a child's hours she gambled you would never count." His teeth caught the lampless light. "We kept our side. The fever broke. Your father lived eleven more years on the strength of summers you never got to have. We have been