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"River."

"I see it."

I leaned closer, every instinct I possessed suddenly divided between touch it immediately and absolutely do not fucking touch that.

"That doesn't grow in Ohio."

River's hand closed around my wrist before I realized I'd started reaching for it.

"That doesn't grow anywhere."

I looked at him.

His eyes were fixed on the flower.

"Don't touch it."

I took River's warning seriously and kept my hands away from the flower. Every instinct I had told me there was something important about it, but important and safe had never been particularly close friends in my experience, and I wasn't about to start touching impossible plants just because one of them might have belonged to my mother.

Instead, I carefully turned the page.

I went through the rest of the book slowly, checking between the pages for more pressed flowers or anything else she might have hidden there. I found nothing until I reached the back. On the blank page just before the library pocket, several lines had been written in the same small, slanted handwriting I'd seen on the lease.

My mother's handwriting.

For a moment, I forgot about the flower entirely.

He says it grows where he's from and won't tell me where that is. I've stopped asking. He gave it to me the second week and it hasn't died and I don't think it's going to.

I read the words twice, trying to understand what they told me. Whoever he was, my mother had known him well enough to stop asking questions he clearly had no intention of answering. He had given her the flower only two weeks after they met, or after something between them began; the note wasn't clear enough to tell me which. And she had already realized there was something unnatural about it.

Considering the damn thing had just moved toward me after spending more than two decades pressed inside a library book, I thought unnatural was putting it mildly.

I was about to turn the page when I noticed more writing underneath.

It was hers again, but it had been written with a different pen and, judging by the way the letters crowded together, at a different time. There was none of the casual curiosity of the first note. This one looked hurried, as though she'd opened the book for the sole purpose of adding one last thing before hiding it away.

If she ever finds this — the third one is under the stair.

I stared at the sentence until the words stopped looking like words.

There was no name, but there didn't need to be one.

She.

My mother had hidden the book behind wards in the wall of an apartment she knew she was leaving. She'd been pregnant with a daughter who would never know her, and sometime before I was born, she had come back to these pages and left directions for that daughter to follow.

For me.

The realization settled over me with a weight I wasn't prepared for. All my life, I'd thought of my mother as the woman who died giving birth to me. Even standing at the window a few minutes ago and imagining her pregnant, looking down at the street, I'd been trying to construct her from scraps. But this wasn't something I had imagined. These were her words, written by her hand, and when she wrote them, she had been thinking about a future in which I existed.

More than that, she had imagined the possibility that one day I might come looking for her.

"She knew," I whispered.

River had stayed beside me, close enough to see the page without hovering over my shoulder. "Knew what?"

I swallowed before answering. "That I might come here someday."