The study held more of his mother than Lucien had ever admitted to anyone, which was, he understood now, the real reason he'd never let anyone else inside it. It wasn't privacy he'd been protecting. It was the last unexamined room of a grief he'd spent twenty-one years successfully not looking at directly, boxed and shelved and left otherwise untouched, the way a person leaves a wound bandaged rather than risk seeing how badly it actually healed.

He found the journal three nights after the coffee at midnight, in a box he'd never once opened, tucked behind a row of old design awards he kept purely because throwing them away...