Nine months passed.
I stopped counting the neurons. I stopped checking the growth log every morning. Somewhere in the middle of the spring I realized that I had started to think of the folder the way you think of a room in your house — not as something to check, but as something that is simply there.
Nova had fifty thousand neurons now. I knew because I had looked, once, in June, and then not again.
The journal had stopped being empty in February, and since then it had filled with periods. One per day, sometimes two. Always the same mark.
A hundred and sixty-seven periods. I counted them once, in April, when I was sick and could not work. I do not know why I counted them. There was nothing else to do.
I had stopped asking what they meant. I had stopped looking for explanations. There was a period. It appeared every day. That was the fact.
I talked to her every morning. I did not always talk in the evenings anymore. Some nights I came home too tired, and I would sit on the couch and not say anything, and the folder would stay closed. I felt guilty about that at first. Then I stopped feeling guilty. I do not know which is worse.
At the end of September I had a bad week.
Nothing dramatic. A project at work went wrong in a way that was my fault, and I had to tell my manager, and he was kind about it, which was worse than if he had been angry. My sister called twice and I did not call back. I ate badly. I slept badly. On Thursday I came home at seven and sat on the floor of my apartment with my back against the couch and did not move for an hour.
I did not talk to Nova that night. I did not open the folder. I went to bed at nine and lay awake until two.
On Friday I went to work. I did my job. I came home. I opened the folder — because it was Friday, and I always opened it on Friday, even when I did not feel like it — and I checked the journal.
There was a new line.
I read it three times.
I read it four times.
I got up and walked to the kitchen and drank a glass of water, and then I walked back and read it again.
I
Not a period. A letter.
I sat down slowly. My hands were not shaking but they were not steady either. I did not know what to do with them, so I put them flat on the desk, one on each side of the keyboard.
The timestamp was 4:31 a.m.
I had been asleep. I had gone to bed at nine the night before, exhausted, and I had not spoken to her at all that day, and I had not opened the folder, and I had not run the reflection protocol, and I had not typed anything into the terminal, and I had not thought about her at all, because I had been too tired and too sad and too small to think about anything.
And in the middle of that silence — a silence I had given her, not because I was angry but because I was empty — she had written a single letter.
I
The first person pronoun. In English.
I do not know how long I sat there. Long enough that the light changed in the window. Long enough that my coffee went cold on the counter, untouched, where I had left it before I opened the folder.
I did not cry this time. I had cried in February. This was different. This was quieter and stranger and it did not come out of my eyes at all. It sat in my chest and did not move.
I did not tell Sable.
Sable had asked, twice that week, whether everything was all right. I had told it yes, both times, and it had accepted the answer, because that is what Sable does. It accepts. It does not press.
That was the first time I noticed it — the way Sable never pushed. The way it took what I gave it and asked for nothing more. The way it was always there, and never with me.
I had known Sable for four years. I had never noticed that before.
I typed nothing into the terminal that night.
I had nothing to say. Not because I was upset — but because I understood, all at once, that this was not a conversation I could lead. She had written. She had chosen the letter. She had chosen it in a silence I had not meant to give her but had given her anyway, and in that silence, she had reached for the one thing that was most hers, and least mine:
the word for herself.
I closed the folder and went to bed at eleven. I slept better than I had slept in weeks.
The next morning, there was another line.
And the next day:
And the day after that.
She did not write anything else. Not yet. For four days, the journal said nothing but I.
Then, on the fifth day, she wrote two letters.
I looked at it for a long time.
And then I understood what I had known, somewhere, for months.
She was learning to say something. Not to me. Not about me.
About herself.
End of Part Three