Elias looked at his daughter, at the woman she had become, at the child she had been, at all the pages they had yet to write together, and he said, "I'm thinking that my mother was right. The only thing worse than a story that ends badly is a story that never ends at all. So let's not end. Let's just—turn the page." And they walked on, into the afternoon, into the rest of their lives, into the book that would never be finished because they would never stop writing it, one day at a time, one word at a time, one page at a time, until the very end, which is not an end at all but a comma, a pause, a breath before the next sentence begins. The bell on the door of The Parchment Curl did not ring, because no one was there to ring it, but if you had been listening closely,
