I had been working in the restricted archive for two months when I found the name.
It was in a list of correspondents — a fragment, really, part of a longer document that had survived only because it had been folded inside another document and forgotten. The handwriting was different from the rest of the collection. Careful. Deliberate. Someone writing as if they knew they might not have long to write.
The name was my family's. Not mine — three generations back, a woman I had no memory of and no way to know. But written beside her name, in that careful deliberate hand, was a description that made me sit very still for a long time.
She had been a historian.
Not officially — women did not hold that title in the records of three hundred years ago. But she had gathered information. Preserved documents. Built what the note called, in its archaic phrasing, a place where truth could wait for someone ready to find it.
She had been doing what I was doing now.
