That night, unable to sleep, Will returned to the library. He began to translate the journal by flashlight. Sabine’s poems weren’t minor at all. They were devastating—about a woman who built a garden in a prison yard, who taught illiterate factory girls to read using smuggled newspapers, who loved another woman and wrote about it as if the sky were a held breath.

Months passed. He catalogued, de-acidified, resewed bindings. He learned obsolete dialect words. He wrote to rare-book dealers, begged for microfilm access, argued with a dean who said Sabine wasn’t “marketable.” His name, Will Power, became a quiet joke among grant committees—but also a promise. He wouldn’t stop.

Will smiled. “Because someone had to will her back into the world. And I had the right name for it.”

Afterward, a young archivist approached him. “Why did you spend five years on a poet no one remembered?”

Will Power Edward Aubanel had always hated his name. It was a cruel joke his late father, a classics professor with a flair for the absurd, had left him. “Will Power” as a first name, “Edward” as a fig leaf of normalcy, and “Aubanel” as the surname that guaranteed no one would forget the punchline.

By dawn, Will had decided: he would restore the entire journal. Not as a job. As an act of will.

He published Sabine’s poems under a small press he founded called No Witness Press . The first run was thirty copies, hand-bound by Will. One found its way to a poet in Montreal, who read it on public radio. Then a scholar in Lyon. Then a filmmaker.