The first sign was the sketchbook.Emma had kept a sketchbook since she was six years old, the habit starting naturally after the afternoon in Chloe's studio with the fabric remnants and developing into something daily and necessary. She drew everything: clothes, rooms, patterns, the view from her bedroom window, portraits of family members with varying degrees of accuracy and considerable emotional honesty. The sketchbooks accumulated on her shelf in chronological order, small archives of a nine-year-old's interior life.In October, Chloe noticed the current sketchbook had not moved from Emma's desk in two weeks.She did not say anything immediately. Children had rhythms, interests that ebbed and flowed, and she was careful not to be the kind of parent who monitored too closely or attached significance too quickly to normal variation. She watched instead, the way she had learned to watch: attentively but without making the watching visible.What she saw over the following weeks was n
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