SINFUL DESIRES
When a woman in her seventies held up a battered copy of the first novel and said she had read it six times, Delphine held the book for a long moment before opening it to sign.
At the end of the line, when the last reader had gone and the other bookseller was stacking chairs, Delphine looked at Sera across the now empty room.
“You have a question,” she said.
Sera did. She had had it for three years. She had been certain she would be too careful to ask it.
“The third novel,” she said. “The cartographer’s daughter. At the end, when she finally reads the letter. The letter is never quoted. You describe her reading it in four sentences and then it ends. Why did you not put the letter in?”