Chapter 9: The Box

"Not here," I said.

I stepped off the box, still in the ivory gown, and walked out past Corbin without looking at him.

Tobias caught my arm in the hallway. "Roxie, let someone drive you."

"I'm going to Queens."

"In that?"

I looked down. I was wearing six thousand dollars of silk and one sneaker.

Somebody handed me my coat. I went.

Hettie was waiting in her kitchen with the lights on and a battered shoebox on the table.

She had been crying again, and had washed her face to hide it.

"I should have told you years ago," she said.

"Tell me now."

"I kept these because I couldn't throw them out, and I couldn't show you. I didn't know how."

She slid the lid off the box.

It was full of letters, folded in thirds, on thick cream paper with an embossed H at the top.

I picked up the first one.

It was dated seven years ago, in October.

Dear Ms. Pelham, Hallworth & Co. writes to inform you that Ms. Roxie Ludlow is no longer available for work.

Any agency that books her will lose its standing with this house.

I read it twice.

"That was after the engagement party," Hettie said. "A booker I'd known for twenty years sent me a copy. She said she was sorry."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"What would I have said? That your future mother-in-law had made you toxic to every agency in town?"

She wiped her eyes. "You'd have gone to her, and she'd have taken everything else."

"Everything else?"

"You had nobody. Your mother had died that spring. You had me and you had Corbin."

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