The medical entries were near the back, and there were fewer of them than there should have been for a woman who took a year to die.
Trafalgar went through them twice.
Tired. Slept poorly. Ate little. A month later, ate little, again, in the same three words, as though whoever wrote it had run out of ways to say the same thing. Weight down four pounds in the spring. Down seven by midsummer. Headaches that came in the evening and went by morning. Two entries about her hands shaking, then no more entries about her hands.
No diagnosis anywhere. Any physician's alarm, no consultation called in from the surface, no note demanding that somebody do something. A woman who ran an entire house under the ocean grew quieter and thinner across four seasons, and the record of it read like a list of minor inconveniences.
He turned another page, and somewhere around the middle of it he stopped taking anything in.
