I had read the diary twice more before we left. Had found what I was looking for in a February entry three pages past the one about gladness — a passage I had read before without understanding, my mother describing a game she used to play with me when I was small. Seven stars, she had written. We used to find them together, in the same order, every night. She never forgot the sequence. Not once.
Seven stars. The constellation she had shown me from the window of my childhood bedroom, finger tracing the same path night after night until my hands knew it without my mind needing to direct them, until the pattern lived in my muscles like a language I had learned before I knew words.
She'd given you the map before she gave you the territory.
"Yes," I said. "I know it."
I raised my hand to the panel.
