"Okay," Mabel whispered. "Okay, baby. Okay."
"Are you — are you all right?"
"I've been waiting for this call since the day Dora brought her home." A wet laugh. "I used to pray it would never come. Then the last few years, I started praying it would. I'm tired, Nora. I'm so tired of being afraid."
"I'm coming out tomorrow," Nora said. "We'll figure it out. Together."
"Nora —" Mabel hesitated. "That woman. Your — Claire. Is she kind?"
Nora thought of cold fingers on her wrist, of a hundred-dollar bill under a water glass, of Me too at midnight. "I think she's trying to be. I think she's been waiting longer than any of us."
After she hung up, Nora stood at the window again, careful to stay behind the curtain. The photographer was still there. She thought about going down and confronting him, and then she thought about what Dane Whitfield had told Claire — that Julian asking questions was never good news — and she wondered, with a chill, who had pointed the camera at her building. The press? Or her brother?
Chapter 10
Beaumont House
The mansion sat on the cliffs north of Port Calloway, a gray stone house with too many windows, facing the sea like a challenge. Nora had seen it from the water once, on a harbor cruise Lena had dragged her to, and she'd thought it looked like a place where people were lonely in expensive rooms. Now the gates were opening for her, and a housekeeper was taking her coat, and her boots — her good boots, the ones with the scuffed toes — sounded too loud on the marble.
Claire met her in the front hall and stopped three feet away, as if afraid to come closer, as if Nora might shatter. Then Nora — surprising herself — crossed the distance and hugged her, and Claire made that breaking-open sound again, quieter this time, into Nora's shoulder.
"Welcome home," Claire whispered. "God. Welcome home."
Julian was waiting in the library, standing by the fireplace with a man Nora took for a lawyer before he introduced himself — Ellis Grant, fiftyish, silver cufflinks, the watchful stillness of a man paid to anticipate disaster. Julian didn't stand. He looked at Nora the way he'd looked at her at Lumière — measured, cold — and said, "So. The waitress."
"Julian." Claire's voice went arctic. "She's your sister."
"She's a DNA result." But he stood then, because even he had limits, and shook her hand briefly. His palm was dry and cool. "Forgive me if I don't do the reunion scene. I've had twenty-four years to get used to Lillian being gone. You'll forgive me if I need more than a week to get used to her being back."
Tessa — Julian's wife, very pregnant, warm-eyed — broke the tension by hugging Nora hard and whispering, "Ignore him, he's terrified," which was so unexpected Nora laughed, a real laugh, the first in days.
Claire took her upstairs, past Julian's old rooms, past the linen closets, to the end of the east wing. She opened a door, and Nora stepped into a nursery — a white crib, yellow curtains, a mobile of wooden stars turning in the draft. On the wall, framed: a photograph of a baby with a star on her wrist.
"I kept it," Claire said softly. "I couldn't — I couldn't let them pack it away. Every year on March fourteenth I come in here. I used to bring a cupcake with one candle. The housekeeper thinks I'm mad." She picked up a tiny knitted sweater from the crib, yellow, impossibly small. "I made this while I was pregnant. I never got to see if it fit."
Nora took the sweater. It weighed nothing. It weighed everything. She held it against her cheek, and the wool smelled of lavender and twenty-four years, and she thought of Mabel's quilt made of old shirts, and understood for the first time that she had been loved — extravagantly, impossibly loved — by two women who had never met, and that love had not been enough to keep any of them whole.
"I'm not Lillian," she said quietly. "I'm Nora. I don't know if I can be her."
"You don't have to be anyone," Claire said. "You just have to be here. The rest — we'll figure out the rest."
"You don't have to be anyone," Claire said. "You just have to be here. The rest — we'll figure out the rest."
They went down to dinner, because Claire insisted that in that house, whatever the crisis, they ate at seven-thirty. The dining room was long and paneled, the table set for four with a precision that made Nora's restaurant training look amateur. Julian sat at one end, Claire at the other, Tessa and Nora between them like a buffer zone. The food — sole, wild rice, haricots verts — was perfect and tasteless to Nora, who chewed mechanically while the conversation moved around her in careful currents.
"Ellis will need a second sample," Julian said, not looking at her, addressing his wine. "Independent lab. Standard procedure. I'm sure you understand."
"I understand," Nora said.
"And there'll be press. Mother's statement goes out tomorrow. You should know —" He finally looked at her, and his eyes were his mother's eyes, which made it worse. "People are going to say things. That you're after money. That this is a scam. The more dignified you are, the faster it dies."
"I'm not after anything," Nora said quietly. "I had a life. It was a good life. I didn't ask for this."
"None of us did." He said it almost gently, and for a second Nora saw the seven-year-old again. Then his phone buzzed, and the mask came back down, and he excused himself.
Tessa walked Nora to the guest room afterward — a blue room with a view of the sea, a four-poster bed, a bathroom bigger than Nora's apartment. "He's scared," Tessa said at the door, one hand on her belly. "Not of you — of what you change. He's been running this company since he was twenty-five, and he's been running from that nursery since he was seven." She smiled. "For what it's worth, I'm glad you're real. This family could use someone real."