As though pointing to it.
I turned the picture over again.
There was writing beneath the names.
Smaller.
Faded.
I angled it toward the window.
Three words emerged.
For the girls.
“Girls?” Walt asked.
“I don’t know.”
Samuel shook his head.
“Neither do I.”
My phone vibrated.
A text from Denise.
You need to come to the community center.
A second message appeared before I could answer.
Richard Caldwell is here. He found something in Grace’s papers.
Then a photograph came through.
It showed an old cream-colored envelope.
Across the front, written in a woman’s handwriting, were two words:
Eleanor Hayes.
My mother’s name.
Underneath it, in darker ink:
If I never get the courage to give this to her, make sure Victoria gets it someday.
I stared at the screen.
Samuel looked at me.
“What is it?”
I turned the phone toward him.
His face went still.
For almost thirty years, two families had lived with separate pieces of the same history.
And now, after one ridiculous challenge on a neighborhood mat, those pieces were beginning to find each other.
The only question was why Grace Caldwell had written my mother a letter she apparently never sent.
