Chapter Eleven

Jules' POV

It rained the day we buried Nana, which felt like the most Nana thing that could have happened.

She would have said the sky was crying along, and she would have said it without irony, with genuine tenderness for the idea of a weeping world. She would have made everyone tea afterward and told them the rain was a blessing. I stood at the graveside in my good coat — the one I'd had for six years, the hem slightly frayed — and I let the rain hit the top of my head because I'd forgotten an umbrella and it seemed like a small punishment I deserved for not doing a hundred things differently.

Pastor Graham gave a beautiful eulogy. He talked about her laugh and her chocolate chip cookies and the way she could make anyone feel like the most important person in any room. Three farmhands came. The Bailin family came. Old Mae from the general store. A woman I didn't recognize who turned out to have been in Nana's Bible study for twenty years.

They all said the right things to me after. They all held my hands and looked at me with their careful, sad eyes, and I said thank you and yes and she really was and I know, I know, she loved you too.

When they were gone I stayed.

I crouched down in the wet grass at the side of the grave and I put my hand on the edge of the wooden box that held her — it hadn't been filled in yet, they were giving me a moment — and I said the things I hadn't been able to say in front of everyone.

"I'm sorry I wasn't here," I told her. "I'm sorry I was in the city trying to fix something that was already broken and you were here alone and I should have been here. I should have been with you."

The rain came down steady and flat.

"I'm going to figure it out," I said. "I don't know how yet. But I have someone to figure it out for now. You'd have loved him, Nana. Or her. I don't know yet." I pressed my palm flat on the wood. "You'd have been so good at this. Grandmother. You were already so good at it."

I sat with her until my knees ached and the gravediggers started shifting awkwardly at a respectful distance, and then I stood up and walked back to my truck.

The farmhands had been at the site of the house. There wasn't much left — the fire had been thorough in the way that only deliberate fires are. But some things survive. Cast iron survives. Stone survives. And on the second day, one of the hands called Mike, who called me, and I drove out to the ruins.

The kitchen floor was mostly ash. But Nana's cast iron skillet was there, blackened but whole, sitting in the rubble like something stubborn. The foundation stones. Half a wall. The rocking chair frame — only the metal parts of it, the runners, warped but intact. The quilt was gone. The recipe box. The photo albums.

I stood in the wreckage of the kitchen and tried to remember the layout. The window over the sink. The shelf where she kept the cinnamon. The corner where the rocking chair sat. I stood exactly there, in the middle of where warmth had been, and the wind came through the open walls and I was so cold.

I was about to leave when I saw it.

One corner of the farmhouse — the old stone corner, the one built from the original structure, older than everything else — had partially survived. Nana used to keep a metal box in the wall cavity there. She'd shown me once, years ago, sliding out a loose stone to reveal a tin the size of a shoebox. Said her father had built the hiding spot, that it was the safest place on the farm.

The stone was still loose. I pulled it free.

The tin was warped, the lid fused slightly, but it opened. Inside: her important papers. The deed to the land — which I already knew Cooper was helping me handle. A small amount of cash, bone dry. A bundle of letters tied with kitchen string, which I recognized as the letters I'd sent to college and back, every single one she'd kept.

And underneath all of it, a sealed envelope. White. Slightly yellowed at the edges, like it had been there a long time.

My name on the front. Not Nana's handwriting.

I didn't know the handwriting.

I turned it over. No return address. The seal was intact — wax, pressed with something round, like a coin or a button.

I stood in the ruins of the kitchen for a long time holding it.

Then I put it in my jacket pocket, gathered everything else carefully, and walked back to my truck.

I was in Fairview for five days total.

On day three I went to see Mike at the department because he was required to walk me through the investigation process and because I needed to look him in the eye and know he didn't believe it. He didn't. I could tell. He looked at me with the expression of a man who had known me since I was eight and was mortified about what had happened, and he said the right things about the investigation being ongoing and the evidence being examined and justice and process.

I thanked him. I went back to the motel.

I spent the evenings on the edge of the narrow motel bed with Nana's letters in my lap, reading them in order. She had kept all of them, all the way back to the first one I'd sent from a school trip when I was twelve — a single page, half of it a list of things I'd eaten, the other half a declaration that I missed her cooking and the farm was boring without me. Her reply was tucked in with it, as if she'd been keeping both halves of our conversation safe in the same place.

I read them until my eyes ached and then I lay down on the motel bed and put my hands over my stomach in the dark.

"We're leaving tomorrow," I told the ceiling. "We're going somewhere new."

I had decided, sometime between the graveside and the ruins and the reading, that I could not stay. Not in Fairview. Not anywhere near the wreckage of everything that used to be my life. I needed somewhere that didn't know my name. Somewhere I could be just a woman and a pregnancy and a plan, without being the girl whose house burned down, whose husband left, whose grandmother was gone.

I took out the envelope again.

Dorian Arthur.

The return address wasn't there, but a faint impression in the wax seal — I looked at it under the lamp — was the outline of the letter D.

The surname. My mother's surname. Arthur.

I thought about what Nana had said about my mother's family. All dead. A car crash when she was six. They never found the bodies.

I turned the envelope over and over in my hands.

Then I put it back in my pocket, set my alarm for six, and made myself sleep.

I would open it when I was ready.

I wasn't ready yet.