Small diamond outline tattoo on a wrist

The cutter has taken to calling me Sparrow, which I'd mind more if he didn't also let me sweep the bench at four o'clock with the good brush. Yesterday he sat me down over the lap, a flat iron disc spinning under a smear of oil and diamond dust, and made me watch him take a corner off a stone the size of a pea. He said the trick is to read the grain before you touch it, the way you'd read a face across a crowded room. I didn't tell him I had no idea what he meant.

Still, I drew the pattern you asked for, the one from the old Cutter's Almanac, a plain stone seen from above with its table and pavilion ruled out in triangles. It's the simplest thing in the world and the hardest to get right, because every line has to meet the next exactly or the whole thing looks lopsided. I practised it on the back of a pay envelope until my hand ached. He pinned the sheet above the bench and said, "That's a stone with nothing to hide."

Ma wrote that she's selling the piano to pay the rent on the flat. Don't tell her I know. Mr Okafor from the shop on the corner has offered me Saturday work wrapping parcels, and I've said yes, though the wages are poor. If the lap holds, the cutter says I might have a first stone by Christmas, a small one, and you can have it set however you like.

Write back soon and tell me the sea is still awful at Margate. When the afternoon light comes through the window and breaks across the bench in little bars of colour, I think of you, and I think you'd laugh at how seriously I take it all.

Yours, Ada