We’d moved inside, away from the cold, but my hand still trembled as I turned to the next page. It was blank.
“Oh no,” Madeline breathed.
My heart started beating furiously. I turned another page. Blank. “I knew we were close. But not this close. That can’t be all,” I said. “It can’t be. That can’t be where this ends.”
“It can’t be.” Madeline held out her hand for the journal. She started flipping pages, calm and confident. She flipped, becoming less calm and confident with every page, to the very end, where Frida’s address in Chicago was written. Blank, blank, blank.
“Give it to me,” I said. She did. I held the journal upside down, shook it. Now I was the one acting stupid—as if Anna had left some hidden entry that would only appear seventy-five years later, when her adopted great-granddaughter shook it loose from the spine. But I refused to concede that the journal would end there, that she’d give up hope now, on such a random day, on such a depressing thought. All the strings were just hanging there, disconnected.
“There’s nothing,” Madeline said with a sigh. “That’s the end.”
“Maybe there’s another diary,” I tried desperately. “One that picks up right after this.”
“Maybe.”
Madeline was just being nice. She was probably afraid to upset me again. But clearly there was no other diary. It wasn’t like Anna had run out of space here. There were a decent number of pages to go; she chose to leave them blank. There wasn’t some big change that would warrant a fresh journal, either. The new year had come and gone. Her birthday was over.
“There’s just . . .” I spluttered. My hands were full-on shaking now. It took all my resolve not to throw the diary across the room. “It’s not . . . Why didn’t . . .” I closed my eyes, opened them again, placed the diary gently on the floor. Once it was safe from me, I gripped my hair and screamed.
Madeline made me sit down on the couch. “It was her real life, Imani,” she said apologetically. “It’s not some book we read in school with, like, symbols and themes. She didn’t have to end with any closure.”
I could have killed Madeline and her sensible reasoning. “I know,” I said angrily.
“I hate it too,” she insisted. “But Anna was writing for Belle, and she lost faith that Belle would ever read it. She said so herself. She was never writing for us. She wrote this long before you were even born.”
“I know,” I said again. But did I? Grandma Anna had left me her books. It was as though she wanted me to find this, to read it at this exact moment in my life. It felt like she had written it precisely for me.
I expected, when it ended, to be sad.
I hadn’t expected to feel abandoned.