Chapter 16: What the Creature Can and Cannot Do

The third notebook was green.

The other two had been black — the dense, authoritative black of composition books, their covers soft with handling — but the third was a peculiar institutional green, the color of hospital walls and old government offices, and Old Betty held it in her lap for a long moment before she opened it. Her hands, Mara noticed, were doing something they hadn't done with the other notebooks. They were pressing down on the cover rather than simply resting on it. As though the cover might lift on its own.

"This one," Old Betty said, "I have not shown to anyone."