Eleanor drank the tea. It was strong and hot and it steadied her.
"I've asked Emily to tell me about Saint Mary's," Eleanor said. "About how she came to you. I'd like to hear it from you, if you're willing."
Agnes looked at Emily, who nodded once.
"It was March," Agnes said. "Twenty-three years ago this past spring. I remember because the rain had turned to sleet and the wind was coming off the harbor sideways. I wasn't there — I took her at six months, from the orphanage, not from the door. But Father Byrne told me the story when I adopted her, and he told it the same way every time I asked, which was often." She folded her hands in her lap. "A baby girl, left at the door of Saint Mary's Orphanage in the night. Wrapped in a blanket. Nothing else. No note. No name. No basket with a ribbon, the way they do in the pictures — just a blanket and a doorstep and the sleet."
"No one saw who left her."
"Father Byrne found her himself, doing his rounds before matins. He always said it was a mercy the cold didn't take her." Agnes's voice didn't waver, but her hands tightened. "The intake records noted the date. March 15, 2003. A nurse at the orphanage wrote down what she weighed and that she had a mark on her wrist, shaped like a heart."
Eleanor's breath caught. "March fifteenth."
"The night after the fire," Emily said quietly. She was sitting on the arm of Agnes's chair, close to the older woman, and Eleanor saw the way Agnes's shoulder leaned almost imperceptibly toward the girl. "The fire was March fourteenth."
They sat with that for a while. The refrigerator hummed. A bus went by outside.
"I've thought about the woman who left her," Agnes said at last, "every year on that date. Not with anger — I never could manage anger about it. With curiosity, I suppose. What kind of desperation leaves a baby on a doorstep in the sleet with nothing but a blanket."
Eleanor shook her head, and the shame rose in her again, hot and specific: she had money and lawyers and a private investigator, and this woman had raised her daughter on a widow's pension and love, and had prayed for a stranger.
"Mrs. Doyle — Agnes — I want you to know that I don't intend to — to disrupt anything." Eleanor heard how thin it sounded. "Emily is twenty-three. She's her own person. I'm not here to claim her like property."
"I know," Agnes said. "If I thought you were, you wouldn't be drinking my tea."
Emily laughed, a short surprised sound, and Eleanor felt something loosen in her chest.
They talked then — about Emily at seven with chicken pox, at sixteen bussing tables and coming home with blistered feet and tips in a jar. Agnes told the stories with the ease of long practice, and Emily protested and corrected, and Eleanor listened the way a starving person eats, trying not to show it.
It was Agnes who finally set her cup down and said, "Mrs. Whitmore. May I ask you something."
"Of course."
"Where were you all these years?"
The room went still. Emily looked at the floor.
Eleanor had rehearsed answers to many questions on the drive over — about the fire, the test, Richard, money, intentions. She had no rehearsed answer for this one, because it was the only question that mattered, and she had been asking it of herself for weeks.
"I was in a house on Beacon Hill," she said, "being told my daughter was dead. I was sedated, and then I was grieving, and then I was —" She stopped. "I never saw a body, Agnes. I never asked to. I let my husband handle everything — the identification, the papers, the cremation — and I told myself that was grief, and propriety, and trust. But the truth is that I was afraid. Afraid that if I looked too closely, I'd find something I couldn't live with. So I didn't look. For twenty-three years, I didn't look."
Agnes held her gaze. "And now you're looking."
"Now I'm looking."
Agnes nodded, once, slowly. Then she stood up — a little stiffly, a hand on the chair arm — and crossed to the refrigerator and took down one of the crayon drawings, the spire lopsided and the sky scribbled blue. She handed it to Eleanor.
"She drew that when she was four," Agnes said. "Take it. You've missed enough."
Eleanor took the drawing with both hands, and her vision blurred, and she did not try to hide it. Emily stood up and came around the chair and put a hand on Eleanor's shoulder — briefly, lightly, the way you touch something you haven't decided about yet — and Eleanor sat very still.
On the drive back to Beacon Hill, the drawing lay on the passenger seat beside her, and Eleanor kept glancing at it at red lights: the lopsided spire, the scribbled sky, the fierce confidence of a four-year-old's line. She had missed the four-year-old. She had missed all of it.
Chapter 9: Behind the Photograph
The house was quiet in the particular way it got when Richard was at the club and the cleaning woman had gone — not empty, exactly, but held, like a held breath. Eleanor sat at the small writing desk in the upstairs study, where the light came in flat and gray off the alley, and unclasped her locket.
She had worn it for twenty-three years without taking it off except to sleep, and some mornings she slept in it too, waking with the silver warm against her sternum. The chain had been repaired twice. The locket itself had never once been opened by anyone but her. There had never been a reason for anyone else to open it.