Chapter 6
Nora knelt beside him without being asked. Inside, wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket, was a smaller collection of things that had clearly once belonged to a woman — a hairbrush, a stack of letters tied with ribbon, a child’s drawing gone soft and grey with age.
Adrian lifted the drawing first. A crooked house. A woman with yellow hair. A small boy holding her hand.
“I drew this the week before she died,” he said. “I don’t actually remember drawing it. I just remember her telling me it was the best house she’d ever seen, even though I couldn’t stay inside the lines.”
His voice had gone somewhere Nora had never heard it go. Not the boardroom voice. Not the voice that emptied rooms with two words. Something younger. Something that had been waiting twenty years for someone safe enough to hear it.
“She used to sing when she thought no one could hear her,” he continued. “Off-key. Terribly off-key. I used to sit outside her door just to listen to her get the words wrong.”
Nora didn’t interrupt. She had learned, over three years of silence in this house, exactly when a person needed to be heard and not answered.
At the bottom of the trunk, beneath the letters, her fingers found something small and cold. A locket, tarnished from decades without polish, the clasp stiff with age. Adrian took it from her carefully, like it might dissolve.
He pried it open.
Inside was a photograph — younger, faded, a woman who looked enough like Adrian that there was no question whose mother she was. Standing beside her, unexpected, was another woman. Younger, dark-haired, laughing at something outside the frame.
Nora went very still.
“That’s her,” she whispered. “That’s my mother.”
Adrian turned the locket toward the lamplight, studying the two women standing shoulder to shoulder like something more than employer and staff. Like something closer to sisters.
Engraved on the inside of the locket’s lid, worn nearly smooth by thumbs that had opened it a thousand times, were four words.
Together, always. No exceptions.
“They were friends,” Adrian said, like the realization physically hurt him. “Not employer and maid. Friends.”
“My mother never talked about her like an employer,” Nora said. “She talked about her like someone she’d have died for.”
The word hung in the room longer than either of them wanted it to.
Adrian closed the locket slowly, his thumb tracing the same worn groove countless fingers had traced before his. When he looked up at Nora, something had shifted in his face — the careful distance he kept from everyone, everywhere, in every room he’d ever walked into, had quietly folded itself away.
“Three years,” he said. “Three years you brought me coffee without cinnamon, and let me pretend I was drinking bourbon I never touched, and I never once asked who you actually were underneath the uniform.”
“You weren’t supposed to notice me. That was the job.”
“I noticed everything.” He said it simply, without performance, the way a man says something he’s only just allowed himself to admit. “I just didn’t let myself call it what it was.”
Nora’s breath caught, quiet enough that she thought he might not hear it.
He heard it anyway.
Neither of them moved to close the distance between them. Not yet. But for the first time, neither of them moved away from it, either.
May you like
It was the letters, tied in ribbon at the bottom of the trunk, that finished what the locket started.
Adrian read them one by one, Nora beside him, until he reached the last page his mother had ever written — dated three days before the crash. The handwriting had changed by then. Faster. Frightened.
