Cynthia Vickers stood on the porch with her husband behind her.
Quentin was a heavy man in a camel coat, with a face like a closed door.
Beside them stood a woman in a blazer holding a clipboard.
“This is Leanne,” Cynthia said, walking past me. “She’ll be taking photographs.”
“Photographs of what?”
“The house, dear. Quentin’s company has first right to buy it under the partnership agreement. We’d like to move quickly.”
She trailed one gloved finger along the banister, then looked at the dust on her glove, though there was none.
Leanne flashed her camera at the staircase, the chandelier, Adeline Wolcott’s portrait in the hall.
Stella came to the top of the stairs in her socks.
Seven years old, with Tommy’s dark eyes and a white pawn still clutched in her hand.
“Mama?”
“Go back to your room, sweetheart.”
“Who are those people?”
“No one important,” Cynthia said sweetly.
She turned back to me.
“You’ll want to start packing. Take only what’s yours.” Her eyes traveled to the kitchen doorway. “Which, as I understand it, is not much.”
Then she saw the chipped blue mug on the counter, still half full of Chester’s last coffee.
I don’t know why I hadn’t washed it.
Cynthia reached for it. “That’s part of the estate.”
My hand closed over it before hers could.
For a second, we both held on.
Her nails were pale pink and sharp against my knuckles.
The coffee had gone cold and smelled of burnt toast and old silence.
“Let go,” she said, very quietly.
“No.”
“You are a housekeeper, Natalie.”
“He asked me to keep using it.”
“He was a sick old man who didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Cynthia,” Quentin said from the hall, almost bored. “Leave it. Friday.”
She released the mug.
Her smile came back like a light switched on.
“Friday,” she agreed.
They left in a black Mercedes that purred down the gravel drive.
I stood at the sink, shaking, rinsing a mug that would never again hold his coffee.
That night I put Stella to bed.
She fell asleep with the pawn against her cheek and one finger still curled around it.
“Are we leaving, Mama?” she had asked, so softly that I almost didn’t hear.
“Not tonight,” I told her.
It was the only honest answer I had.
When the house went quiet, I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets and the wooden box in my lap.
The clock ticked.
Wind pushed at the window glass.
The lid came up with a soft click.
Inside, on a bed of faded green felt, lay one small white card.
Two words, typed.
“Keep going.”
I stopped breathing.
The lowercase “e” in “keep” sat a little crooked, lifted at the tail, as if the machine itself had a limp.
I knew that “e.”
I had looked at it every August for five years of my life, under the dim light of a Maple Hill dormitory, running my thumb across the ink.
I got up so fast that the box hit the tile.
Upstairs, in the bottom of my sewing basket, wrapped in a towel, was the rusted cookie tin.
I carried it down with both hands.
I laid out the five old cards on the kitchen table, side by side, and set the new one at the end of the row.
Six cards.
