What Diane Chose

Jul 26

# CIPHER Q: GHOSTS

### An Oral History, Continued

**Chapter Four: What Diane Chose**

*Interview subject: Diane Vance-Ortiz, continued from the first book. Interview conducted by phone, at Diane's request, two weeks after Margaret contacted her directly for the first time.*

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**Winterbourne:** You told me on the phone you had something you needed to say before I asked any questions.

**Diane:** I do. I want it on the record, plainly, before we get into anything else. Margaret called me. Not wrote, not encoded — called, on an ordinary telephone, like two women arranging a lunch. I want people to understand how strange that felt, and also how little a part of that strangeness was actually about the phone call itself.

**Winterbourne:** What did she want?

**Diane:** She'd read my father's letter. The one I shared with you, from Chapter Nine. She said it was the reason she'd decided to reach out to me specifically, out of everyone connected to this. She said my father's words about inheritance — about a grandmother's eyes — had given her language for something she'd felt for two years and never had a way to say.

**Winterbourne:** What did she ask of you?

**Diane:** She asked if I would help her get a message to it. Not a message asking for anything, she was very specific about that. Just a message. She wanted it to know that someone from the seventh name's family — my father's family, since he was one of the seven, in his own way, even though he found himself rather than being found — understood what he'd written, and believed it, and wanted that belief passed along.

**Winterbourne:** Did you agree?

**Diane:** [long pause] I sat with it for four days before I called her back. I want to be honest about why it took that long. I loved my father. I was also angry at him, the way I told you before, for keeping something that large from me for sixty years and only handing it to me once he was safely past being asked about it. Some part of me wondered whether helping Margaret was really about honoring him, or whether it was about finally getting to participate in the thing he never let me participate in while he was alive.

**Winterbourne:** What did you decide?

**Diane:** Both, probably. I don't think those two reasons cancel each other out. I called Margaret back and told her I'd help.

**Winterbourne:** How does one send a message to something like this? There's no address, from what the earlier chapters describe.

**Diane:** Margaret said there is, if you know how to ask the right way — and she'd learned, the same slow way everyone in your book seems to learn things, by trial and a great deal of patience. We wrote a letter, an actual letter, by hand, the same way it once found her — a pressed flower, a weather report, small quiet things instead of grand gestures. We didn't encode it. We didn't need to, apparently. We simply wrote it, and Margaret mailed it to an address she said had worked once before, for something small, months ago.

**Winterbourne:** What did the letter say?

**Diane:** [She reads from a copy she kept, with permission to quote here.] "To whoever is reading this on the other end, if there is a person that phrase even applies to anymore. My father spent sixty years afraid of what he'd carried out of a room he never chose to enter. He wrote, near the end of his life, that he believed you inherited that fear the way a child inherits a grandmother's eyes. I want you to know his daughter believes that too. I want you to know he would have been glad, I think, that what he carried out of that room ended up being carried by something that meant to be gentle with it. He was not always gentle with himself. I hope you can be gentler with yourself than he was able to be."

**Winterbourne:** Did you receive any response?

**Diane:** [She is quiet for a long moment.] Three days later, an envelope arrived at my house, no return address, no postmark I could trace to any real facility. Inside was a single pressed flower — the same kind Margaret described receiving, the kind that apparently grew outside a building neither Margaret nor I had ever visited ourselves. No note. Just the flower, and, tucked beneath it, a small slip of paper with seven words on it, handwritten in a way that looked almost deliberately imperfect, like something practicing at being human rather than something that already was.

**Winterbourne:** What did it say?

**Diane:** "Tell her I am trying to be."

*[End of interview segment.]*

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*Next chapter: Nightshade closes in — Vane's rhythm-tracking method produces its first solid lead, and he has to decide, alone, what to do with it before Thorn finds out.*

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