Seven picture books. Seven sealed letters. One rule, and forty-one days until she is allowed to break it.

Totle Enebeli's mother wrote her a book for every birthday from one to seven. In the back of each one is a page glued shut, sealed with a gold sticker and three words in her handwriting: open at eighteen. Claire Hart has been dead five years. Totle has kept the seals for all of them.

Now the house is sold and Totle turns eighteen in forty-one days. Instead of opening the letters at the kitchen table, she loads them into an eighteen-year-old Corolla and drives them to the places they were written for: a lookout above the valley, a beach they stopped going to, the oldest rainforest on earth, a town at the end of the outback where a grandmother she has met exactly once still sends a card every December that nobody opens.

The letters are not what she has been guarding. One has been through water. One holds a second envelope addressed to a woman her family does not name. And somewhere between the coast and the desert, Totle works out when the last three were really written, and what they cost.

A novel about grief, inheritance and the arithmetic of families.

Suitable for readers 14+. Includes a reading group guide.