Limited Love novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Box Marked Archive
The Higginson estate in Brookline looked the same at seven in the morning as it had when I was a child, with gray stone and wet lawns and one light burning in the east wing.
Eleanor met us in the hall with her coat still buttoned.
She looked at Chadwick's creased shirt and at my hair, and her mouth twitched.
"Good," she said. "You've both slept. Come."
His old study was at the end of the east corridor.
It was a square, dark room with a rolltop desk, a globe, and a window seat where I had once read all of a rainy August.
Nobody had changed anything in it since Chadwick was twenty-two.
On the desk stood a cardboard box with a white label.
"I sent my housekeeper to the tower on Monday," Eleanor said. "I asked her to bring me anything the Dunne girl had cleared out of his office."
Chadwick frowned.
"What?"
"She cleared your personal files last winter. Do you remember? She told you your office was too cluttered, and she'd archive anything private."
"I told her to put it in storage."
"She put it here," said Eleanor. "With my housekeeper, who thought nothing of it. In the cellar."
She lifted the lid.
Inside lay a stack of envelopes tied in a pink ribbon.
They were thick cream envelopes with the Higginson crest in the corner, and each one had a single word on the front, in black ink.
Eileen.
I knew the handwriting.
I had watched it sign our marriage license and a hundred birthday cards, and I had watched it sign a napkin in my kitchen only two days ago.
"Thirty-one," said Eleanor. "I counted."
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