She stepped inside. The floorboards were cold through her stockings. She took the small quilt from the crib — hand-stitched, a gift from a cousin — and folded it, and set it in the open suitcase. She took the framed print of the alphabet animals off the wall. She left the crib. She left the curtains. She could not decide, and then she decided: she would not dismantle it entirely. She would leave the shell. Whatever came next for this house was not her concern.
"Eleanor."
Richard was in the doorway. He looked older than he had a week ago. Eleanor noted it the way she noted everything now — as fact, without the softening she had once applied to him.
"I've signed the papers your lawyer sent," he said. "The separation agreement. All of it."
"Good."
"I've also — " He stopped. He was holding something. A bank statement, folded. "I've stopped the payments. To Claire. This month's won't go out. I wanted you to know."
Eleanor considered this. "Why are you telling me?"
"Because it's yours to know. All of it, now." He came a step into the room, and the floorboards gave under his weight. "I want to say — I know saying doesn't repair anything. But I want you to know that I loved her. That I loved you. That none of this was — indifference. It was fear. It was the worst kind of fear, the kind that dresses itself up as responsibility."
Eleanor set the framed print into the suitcase and closed the lid. The clasp clicked with a small, final sound.
"I believe you," she said. "I believe you loved us both. And I believe that when it mattered, you chose the name over the child. Those things are both true. That is what I will carry with me."
He nodded, once, the way a man accepts a sentence. "Will you — will she see me? Emily."
"I don't know." Eleanor looked at him directly. "That isn't mine to grant. She decides who she is now, and who she lets in. I won't steer her toward you and I won't steer her away. You made your choices about her long before she could make hers."
Richard's hands were empty now; he had set the folded statement on the dresser. He stood in the doorway of the nursery he had allowed her to keep for twenty-three years, and he said, very quietly, "I would give it all back. The name, the foundation. All of it."
"I know," Eleanor said. "That's the tragedy of it. You'd give it back now. You wouldn't give it then."
She lifted the suitcase. It was lighter than she had expected — a life, packed, was never as heavy as a life lived. At the door she paused, and for a moment she thought he would reach for her, and for a moment she thought she might let him. But the moment passed, and she walked past him into the hallway.
The stairs were the same stairs she had climbed on her wedding night, giddy and a little drunk on champagne, with Richard carrying her over nothing because the threshold of a Beacon Hill townhouse was not a thing one was carried over. She had been twenty-seven. She had believed, then, that a good life was something you built carefully and kept clean, the way you kept a house. She had not understood that a house could be clean and still be hollow underneath.
At the front door she stopped and set the suitcase down, and looked back once — at the stair runner, the framed prints, the umbrella stand that had been her mother's. None of it was hers anymore. All of it had belonged to a life she no longer recognized as her own.
Then she picked up the suitcase, opened the door, and stepped out into the cold bright air of Beacon Street.
The locket was at her throat. It had broken her life — that was the plain truth of it. It had cracked open a marriage, a house, a history, and let the truth pour out. But it had also told the truth, and the truth was the only thing she had left that was clean. She touched it once, briefly, with her fingertips.
She did not know where she would live. She knew she would not live a lie. She walked down the steps, and the door closed behind her, and she kept walking.
Chapter 16: Emily's Choice
The scar was the size of a quarter.
Emily stood in Agnes's bathroom in South Boston, her shirt lifted, her back to the mirror, twisting to see it. She had looked at it a thousand times — the small, pale burn scar on her right shoulder blade, roundish, the skin a little too smooth. Agnes had always said it must have happened before the orphanage, that some babies got hurt in small accidents nobody recorded. Emily had believed it the way you believe anything your mother tells you.
Now she knew. She had been five days old. She had been in a fire.
"You're going to pull something, twisting like that," Agnes said from the doorway, and Emily let the shirt fall and turned around, and her mother — the only mother she had ever known — was looking at her with an expression Emily had never seen. Not pity. Recognition.
"I know what it is now," Emily said.
"I know you do." Agnes came into the small bathroom and put her hands on Emily's shoulders, thumbs resting lightly near the place the scar was. "Sit down, love. We need to talk about this properly, and not in a bathroom."
They sat at the kitchen table. Agnes made tea, the way she always did when something needed saying, and for a while neither spoke. The apartment was the same as it had always been — the crocheted afghan on the couch, the clock that ran ten minutes fast, the smell of lemon oil. Emily had grown up here. Every good thing she knew, she had learned at this table.
"She's your mother," Agnes said finally. "By blood. That part is true, and I won't pretend otherwise."
"You're my mother," Emily said.