Black and red hardcover book with blank pages, a gift from my grandmother. “You can write your own story.” Whenever I visited, she’d take me to the bookstore, letting me pick three. We’d take turns reading chapters to each other. In that blank paged book I wrote a mystery of the Nancy Drew ilk. I don’t remember much of it, only that the protagonist was a young girl detective with a dog as her sidekick. There was something that happened in an upstairs room in a shadowy house. I couldn’t tell you what she was investigating, though I do know I filled all the pages, never finishing the story.
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