The Diary

“Is that it?” 

He nodded. 

“Can I touch it?”

“Of course.”

She slid her fingers gently over the spine as if she were afraid that, if she touched it, it would disappear like fog. “I can’t believe it’s real.”

“I know,” he said. “But it is. And it’s ours.”

She turned to face him. “Really?” She reached out, gently sliding it from the shelf. She opened the volume and carefully paged through the full-color and gilt illustrations, calligraphy, recipes, and spells. It was beautiful. “How will we keep it safe?”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “No one else in the world knows what it can do.”

She did not find this reassuring. “How can you be sure?”

“Because if anyone else looks at it, they see nothing.” He raised one eyebrow. “Blank.”

She looked up, realizing she had been holding her breath. “They can’t see this?”

“Nothing. To them it looks like an ancient ledger, forgotten and unused in the bottom of a desk in an abandon library. The lawyer who gave it to me asked why anyone would bother willing something like this to anyone. He said it was a good thing that she had; ‘anyone in their right minds would have thrown it in the bin’.”

She gasped. “Can you imagine? All this—gone forever?”

He looked into her eyes. “Can it ever really be gone?”

“I guess if we’re not here to see it?”

“If we use it properly, that won’t be a problem.”