Mr. Amory, behind her, said nothing.
Wynne looked up from her book.
I have wondered since what she saw. I think she saw an old woman in a doorway who was very obviously trying not to cry and failing. She put the book down, face down, on the table. She got off her chair. She walked across the carpet, a seven-year-old in a purple cardigan and a gap-toothed grin, and stopped about three feet from the stranger.
“Are you my grandmother?” said Wynne.
Waverly Linwood made a sound like a door opening.
“I think so,” she said. “I think I might be. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind.” Wynne considered her. “Do you want to see the picture?”
She held out the clipping.
She’d held on to it through all of it, in her sticky fist, with the other hand in her pocket, and she gave it up like a person handing over the most important thing she owned. The old woman took it. She looked at the headline. She looked at the photograph beneath it, of a young couple smiling, with a street behind them.
And then she looked at the second half, laid beside it, with the soft folded edge.
