Chapter 22: For Eden, Someday

I walked through the house alone, with the keys cold in my fist.

The great room first, because I could not leave it behind me in the dark.

Then the dining room, where I had eaten two thousand dinners with my elbows tucked in.

Then Davis's study, with the window seat where Pierce had fallen asleep in September.

The desk drawers stood open.

Davis had taken what he could carry before the party.

I did not touch anything.

The housekeeper was waiting at the foot of the back stairs, still in her good dress.

She had worked in the house since before I came to it.

"Miss Eden," she said. "I have to show you something. I should have shown you years ago."

"What is it?"

"Your room."

My room was at the top of the back stairs, under the eaves.

It had been a sewing room before it was mine.

It had a slanted ceiling, one window, and a single bed that was too short for me now.

Russell had used it for storage since I left, and boxes of golf clubs sat on the floor.

The housekeeper knelt by the radiator under the window and worked a metal grate loose with her fingernails.

"Mr. Hadfield told me to burn it the week you came," she said.

"He said it would only upset a child."

She put her hand into the dark behind the grate.

"I couldn't."

She drew out a small envelope, soft with age.

On the front, in a hand I had not seen in eighteen years, my mother had written: For Eden, someday.

I sat down on the narrow bed with the envelope in my lap.

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