Leah started the notebooks when Ori was seven and said, at breakfast, that the eggs were going to burn, and then they burned. Leah had thought this was luck. But then there was the afternoon at the park when Ori stopped walking and said someone was going to fall from the climbing structure, and a boy did, three minutes later, badly enough that they called an ambulance. And the time Ori had asked where they were going to bury grandmother, two months before grandmother showed any sign.
The notebooks were not proof. Leah knew this. She was a scientist; she understood that correlation required rigor, and she had not been rigorous. The notebooks were for herself, not for peer review. Eleven of them now, in the specific pale blue of the brand she'd bought at the pharmacy the first time because it was the only one in stock and then deliberately after that. A record. In case it mattered later.
Ori did not talk about it often. She was not dramatic about it. She said the thing that's going to happen the way other children said the thing I want to happen. She had learned, at some point, that adults found it upsetting, and she had become careful. Leah had told her not to be careful with her. She was not sure Ori believed her.
April was three months away. Ori would be ten in April, which was when, all accounts agreed, it stopped. Leah had read everything. It was not clear what happened at ten. Some children reported it as a gradual fading. Some said it was sudden, a morning when they woke and the quality was different and by afternoon it was gone. None of them had been able to describe exactly what was lost. The best approximation anyone had given was knowing where your hands are in the dark, which was not what Leah had expected.
She wrote this in the notebook and underlined it.
It's going to be okay, Ori had said last week, not about anything Leah had asked, just said it over her breakfast, looking out the window. Leah had asked how she knew, and Ori had said, I can see it, and then corrected herself: I can see the shape of it.
Leah wrote this down too.