Chapter 17: The Second Drawer

On Sunday morning Daphne called up the stairs.

"Willa? Would you fetch Birdie's christening gown? I'm in the bath with her and my hands are wet."

"Where is it?"

"My study. The tall cabinet by the window, second shelf. Wrapped in tissue."

Willa went down the hall.

She had never been in her sister's study.

It was a small, sunny room with a white desk, a loveseat and a wall of framed photographs.

Willa looked at them, because there was nothing else to look at.

Daphne and Nolan on the church steps. Daphne at the hospital with Birdie newborn. Daphne with their mother in a garden, laughing.

Willa was in none of them.

She turned to the cabinet, opened it and found the gown wrapped in tissue exactly where she had been told.

It was ivory silk with a hand-stitched hem. A tag in the neck said B.T.C.

Beatrice Tarleton Corwin.

She laid it across her arm.

On the shelf beside it stood a hatbox, tied with a yellow ribbon.

Willa could not have said why she looked. She had been brought up not to touch other people's things.

But the ribbon was loose, and the lid came away in her hand.

Postcards.

A hundred of them, maybe more, sorted into rubber-banded bundles. She knew the top one by the picture of the harbor in Drego.

She had sent it to her mother, and it had been written on the back in her own cramped hand. Tell Dad I'm fine. Tell Daphne I am too.

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