Where the Lavender Grows: Echoes in The Hallway

Dust motes turned slow spirals in the slant of morning light that fell across Aunt Cordelia's desk. The oak was old and scarred, and it groaned when Margot eased open the shallow drawer she had avoided for three days. Inside, beneath a bundle of dried lavender stems tied with kitchen twine, her fingers found a stack of envelopes. Cream-colored paper, soft at the edges, each one addressed in a hand she recognized without quite knowing why.

The handwriting was her aunt's. The same careful, slightly slanted script Margot had seen on jam jar labels and grocery lists and the margins of seed catalogs. But there was something else in these letters, something more deliberate, more private. The name on every envelope was the same: Lillian Pace.

Margot sat back on her heels. The farmhouse kitchen smelled faintly of yesterday's bread and the herbs she had hung to dry above the stove. Outside, beyond the window, she could hear the faint mechanical drone of the old irrigation pump cycling on. She counted eleven envelopes in all, none of them postmarked, none of them opened. They had been written but never sent.

She set the stack on the desk and turned over the first envelope. Inside was a single sheet of folded paper, the crease already worn soft from being opened and refolded many times. Margot glanced toward the doorway. The hall beyond was empty. The house, with its uneven floors and its thick stone walls, held a particular quality of stillness in the mornings, as if it were listening.

She drew a breath, and because the room felt too quiet, she began to read aloud.

"Dearest Lillian," her voice said, and the words sounded strange in the empty room, bouncing off the plaster and returning to her. "If you are reading this, then I have gone and done the thing I swore I would not do, which is leave before I have made anything right between us. You will say that I am stubborn. You will say that I have been stubborn for seventy years and that a few more would not have hurt. You will be right on both counts."

Margot paused. The pump clicked off in the distance. A bee struck the windowpane and buzzed, confused. She smoothed the page against her knee and went on.

"I have been trying to write this letter since April. The first draft was angry. The second was sorry. The third was a list of the things I should have told you and never did. I burned all three. This is the fourth, and I am trying to tell you the truth, which is harder than any of those."

Her throat had gone dry. She reached for the glass of water she kept on the desk and drank, the tap of her fingers against the glass sharp in the quiet. When she set it down, a small ring of condensation marked the wood where the envelope had rested.

"The lavender is late this year," the letter continued. "I do not know if I told you. The crop on the south slope is thin. The bees are confused by the heat. I walked the rows yesterday and thought of the year you and I planted the long border together, when we were both young enough to believe that the world would forgive us for whatever we decided to do with it."

Margot smiled faintly at that. She could picture her aunt walking the rows, her boots dusty, her hair pinned up with whatever was at hand. She could almost see Lillian beside her, though she had only met the woman once, briefly, when she was a child.

"I have kept every letter you sent me since 1974," Margot read, her voice slower now. "I read them in the order I received them, which is not the order you wrote them, because you were never good about dating things, Lillian, you never were. I read them when the house is too quiet and I do not want to think about the solicitor's calls or Daisy's questions or what I am going to do with the south field."

Margot stopped. She had begun to feel like a trespasser, as though she were reading someone else's mail, even though Aunt Cordelia had left her everything, even the desk and its secrets. The letter felt too intimate. It felt like standing in a doorway she had not been invited through.

But she did not put it down.

"I owe you an explanation about the summer of 1981," the letter said. "I owe you an explanation about the boy. I owe you an explanation about why I never came to the door in October, and why I let you think what you thought for so long. None of those explanations are simple. None of them are kind to me. But you deserve them, and I have run out of years in which to pretend otherwise."

The morning light had shifted. It no longer fell across the desk but had moved to the floorboards by Margot's feet, warming the wood. She shifted without thinking, and the floorboard beneath her gave its familiar creak.

Aunt Cordelia's letters had never been a part of her childhood. Margot remembered her aunt as a woman of few words, a woman who said what she meant and meant what she said, who planted things and harvested them and rarely explained herself. To find her in these pages, hesitant, searching, almost tender, was like discovering a room in a house she had always known.

She turned the page over. The ink had feathered slightly where a drop of water, long dried, had fallen. Tears, perhaps. Or water from a glass set down too close.

"If you come to the house," Margot read, "you will find the lavender in the pots by the kitchen door. I have kept them going, even when I could not keep anything else. You said once that the smell of it made you think of your mother. I have thought of that often. I think of it now. I think you would say that I should have written this to her instead of to you, but she is gone, and you are not, and I have always been braver with you than I am with ghosts."

Margot set the letter in her lap. The house ticked around her, the old clock in the hall marking the half hour with a single chime. Beyond the window, the irrigation pump had begun its cycle again, a steady, distant hum that was almost company.

She wanted to know what had happened in 1981. She wanted to know about the boy. She wanted to know why Lillian Pace, who had been her aunt's closest friend for as long as anyone in the village could remember, had not been at the funeral, had not been named in the will, had not been mentioned by anyone except in passing, the way one mentions a neighbor who has moved away.

But the letter was almost finished. Margot lifted it again.

"I am going to put this in the desk," it read. "Not the bureau in the hall, not the drawer by the stove, but the desk, because the desk is the one place I never let anyone else touch, and you always said you understood that about me. If you are reading this, then I did not send it after all. Which means I lost my nerve. Which means you will have to come and find me, or I will have to find you, and I do not know which of us is more afraid."

Margot's hands had begun to tremble slightly. She folded the letter carefully along its original creases and slid it back into its envelope. The envelope she set on the desk, facedown, as if she had not been reading it at all.

There were ten more.

She did not reach for them yet. She sat on the floor with her back against the desk and her knees drawn up, and she listened to the pump, and to the bees, and to the house settling into another day without her aunt in it.

The envelope rested on the desk like a small accusation. Margot watched it for a long moment, the cream paper yellowed at its edges, her aunt's handwriting unmistakable in its careful loops and the slight tremor at the tail of each letter. She had always known that Cordelia's hand had not been steady at the end. She had not known, until this morning, that Cordelia had known it too.

She reached for her phone.

The screen lit with the time, half past one, and then with the cascade of notifications she had been ignoring since the reading of the will: three emails from the notaire, a text from the man who mended the stone wall asking if she wanted him to come this week or next, a news alert from a Boston paper she had forgotten she had subscribed to, years ago, when she still thought of Boston as home.

She did not want any of them. She wanted Boston, specifically, to be very far away, which it was, geographically, and also very close, which it was not, and she tapped Daisy's name before she could decide whether calling was wise.

It rang four times. Five. Six.

"Margot." Daisy's voice was clipped, the consonants of her Boston vowels sharpened into something almost British, a relic of her years at a London firm. "I was just about to call you. The reading was this morning?"

"Yesterday."

"Of course. Yesterday. How did it go?"

Margot closed her eyes. She could hear Daisy's apartment behind her: the espresso machine, the hum of a refrigerator that was too expensive to sound like a refrigerator, the distant clatter of a keyboard belonging to Daisy's assistant, whose name Margot could never remember because Daisy changed assistants every nine months like other people changed seasonal wardrobes.

"It went," Margot said. "She left the farm to me."

"I know." A pause. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Margot, are you actually staying out there?"

The question landed the way Daisy's questions always landed: precisely where she had aimed them. Margot opened her eyes. The phone felt too warm against her ear. The envelope on the desk was still facedown. The pump had stopped, and in the silence she could hear the bees again, a low and rhythmic industry she had once found comforting and now found almost unbearable.

"I have to sort out the estate," she said. "There's the property, the outbuildings, the lavender stock, the, "

"You can do that from here. Hire someone. A property manager. A notaire. There are people who do this."

"I don't want to hire someone. I want to understand what she left me."

Daisy exhaled. Margot heard the sound of a chair being pushed back, of Daisy's heels on the hardwood, of a door being closed.

"Margot," Daisy said, and her voice had dropped into that particular register that Margot had learned to dread, the one that meant Daisy was about to be reasonable. "You're forty-three. You've given fourteen years of your life to that farm. You gave up a career for it. You gave up a life in Boston for it. And now Aunt Cordelia is gone, and the farm is yours, and you have a choice."

"I know what my choices are."

"Then make one. Either you sell it, take the money, and come home. Or you stay, and you commit, and you stop pretending you're going to come back to Boston one day and be the Margot you would have been if you hadn't gone."

The silence was enormous. Margot pressed her hand against the desk's surface, feeling the cool oak under her palm, the place where Cordelia had rested her own hand ten thousand times.

"I'm not pretending," Margot said. "I'm figuring things out."

"By what? Reading old letters? Walking the fields?"

"Yes."

"Margot."

"Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't talk to me like I'm a project. Don't talk to me like I've made a bad decision and you're waiting for me to see it."

"I'm not. I'm asking you a question. Are you actually staying in Maine, or are you keeping the farm for sentimental reasons that have nothing to do with what you actually want?"

Margot thought about the letter on the desk. She thought about the boy in 1981. She thought about Lillian Pace, whose name had not been spoken at the funeral. She thought about Cordelia, who had not sent the letter after all.

"I want to understand what happened here," she said. "I want to know why she left it to me, and not to Mum, and not to you."

"Did you ask the notaire?"

"Not yet."

"Then ask him. Get the paperwork. Get the facts. And then make a decision. Margot, I'm not trying to be cruel. I'm trying to be your sister. I am trying to prevent you from spending another decade of your life in a place that makes you tired."

The farm did not make her tired. She wanted to say so. She wanted to say that the farm was the only place she had ever felt entirely herself, that Cordelia had known this, that leaving was the thing that made her tired, that staying was the thing that made her breathe. But Daisy would not understand. Daisy had never understood. Daisy had been eight years old when Margot had first come to the farm, and Daisy had spent those summers resenting the place because it took Margot away from her, and somewhere in those summers Daisy had built a model of Margot in her head, a model that Margot could neither inhabit nor escape.

"I'm staying," Margot said. "For now."

"For now," Daisy repeated. "That's not a commitment."

"It's what I have."

Daisy was quiet for a long time. Margot heard her assistant's keyboard start up again, heard the espresso machine cycle through its second brew, heard the distant murmur of traffic from the Charles.

"Call me when you know," Daisy said. "Call me when you've made a decision. And Margot?"

"Yes?"

"Don't read too much into old letters. People write things they don't mean. People keep things they should have thrown away."

She hung up. Margot set the phone on the desk and sat with her hands in her lap, feeling the warmth of the conversation still in her ears, feeling the coldness of it, too. She picked up the envelope and turned it over, facing her. The handwriting looked back at her.

She did not open another letter.

She made herself lunch instead, because she knew that if she did not eat she would not be able to think, and she needed to think. She made a tartine of bread and the last of the chèvre from the market, and she ate it standing at the counter, looking out the window at the field. The lavender was in its last bloom. In a week it would be brown. She had not yet decided whether to harvest what was left or to let it go to seed.

She did not know what Cordelia would have wanted. She had not known, these last few months, what Cordelia had wanted about anything. Cordelia had been so careful, in her last year, to keep her thoughts to herself. She had sat in her chair by the stove and looked at the fire and answered Margot's questions with the smallest possible syllables, as if she were rationing her words the way one rations sugar in wartime.

After lunch, Margot worked. She walked the perimeter of the south field, checking the stakes that marked the rows. She counted the bee colonies in the hives near the wall. She wrote numbers in the notebook Cordelia had left for her, a green clothbound book with the monogram C.E. on its front cover, and she tried not to think about the letters in the desk, and she tried not to think about Daisy's voice, and she tried not to think about the boy in 1981.

She failed, at all three.

By late afternoon the sky had turned the particular shade of blue that Cordelia had called "the hour before the swallows go," and Margot went inside and started dinner, a simple thing of eggs and zucchini and the herbs that grew in the clay pots by the kitchen door. She ate at the table, alone. She washed her plate. She went upstairs.

She brushed her teeth. She set her phone on the bedside table. She turned down the bed. The sheets were the ones she had brought from Boston, years ago, pale blue cotton that had softened with use, and she lay down on them and pulled the duvet up to her chin and looked at the ceiling.

She was thinking about a lavender field. Not the one outside, not the wind-bent rows of Lavandula angustifolia that had been in her family for three generations, but a different field, an imagined one, the kind that appears in the photographs Cordelia had pinned above her desk when Margot was a girl. There had been a photograph, in particular, that Margot had loved: a woman in a white dress, seen from behind, walking through a field of lavender in full bloom, her hair loose down her back, the sky so wide above her that the woman looked both lost and found.

Margot had asked Cordelia about the photograph once. She had been nine, or ten, or eleven. She could not remember. She remembered only that Cordelia had looked at the photograph for a long time, and then had said, "That was not me," in a voice that meant it was her, or had been her, or had wanted to be her.

Margot closed her eyes. The field in her mind became real. She could smell it. She could feel the dry heat of the sun on the back of her neck. She could feel the stems catching at the hem of the white dress she was wearing, a dress she had never owned, a dress that was too long for her and too light, a dress that wanted to fly.

She was running. She did not know why she was running. There was no one behind her, and there was nothing in front of her, only the lavender and the sky, and she ran because her legs wanted to run, because her lungs wanted air, because the field was asking her to move through it.

She reached the edge of the field. There was a path. The path was made of white stones, and the stones were warm under her bare feet, and at the end of the path there was a door set into a wall she had not seen before, and the door was open, and beyond the door there was a room she had never seen, and in the room there was a woman sitting at a desk, writing a letter.

Margot tried to see the woman's face. The light was wrong. The light came from everywhere and nowhere. The woman looked up, and her face was Cordelia's face, and Cordelia's face was young, and Cordelia's face was old, and Cordelia's face was the face of a woman who had not yet decided whether to send the letter or to keep it.

Margot woke.

The room was dark. The window was open. The air that came through it was cool and smelled of lavender, real lavender, the late-season kind that had begun to dry on the stem and was giving up its last oil to the night.

Margot lay still. She did not move. She breathed in, slowly, and the scent of lavender filled her chest, and the scent of lavender filled the pillow beside her, and the scent of lavender came from somewhere in the room that she could not see.

She lifted her head. The pillow beside hers was faintly yellowed, faintly damp. A single sprig of lavender lay across it, fresh, the buds still tight, the stem still green.

She had not put it there. She had not been in the room since she had brushed her teeth. She had not opened the window. She had not left the door unlocked. She had been alone in the house since the reading of the will.

She reached for the sprig. It was cool in her fingers. It smelled the way lavender smelled when Cordelia had cut it for the drying room, the way she had smelled it the summer Margot had turned twelve and Cordelia had first taught her how to harvest, how to cut the stems without bruising them, how to bundle them with twine and hang them in the barn until they were dry enough to strip.

Margot lay back down. She put the sprig under her nose. She breathed.

Outside, the pump had stopped. The bees had gone quiet. The house was very still, the kind of still that means someone is listening, or someone has just left, or someone has always been there and has only now decided to be noticed.

Margot did not sleep again for a long time. She lay in the dark with the sprig of lavender against her face, and she thought about the door in the field, and the woman at the desk, and the letter that had not been sent, and the boy in 1981, and the housekeeper who had not been at the funeral.

She thought about Lillian Pace. She thought about how Lillian had not been named in the will. She thought about how Lillian had not been mentioned by anyone except in passing, the way one mentions a neighbor who has moved away.

She thought about how Cordelia had always, in every letter she had ever written to Margot, signed her name with the same phrase: "Write back, or come and find me."

Margot had never written back. Margot had come, but Margot had not found her, because Margot had not known what she was looking for.

She lay in the dark, and she waited for morning, and when morning came she would go to the village, and she would find Lillian Pace, and she would ask her what had happened in 1981.

The morning arrived not with light but with sound. A rooster, somewhere beyond the orchard, screamed its single high note three times. Then the sound of tires on gravel. Then Daisy's voice, already mid-sentence, calling from the drive.

Margot sat up. The sprig of lavender fell from her face onto the pillow. She caught it before it slid to the floor, an instinct she did not pause to question, and tucked it into the pocket of her cardigan. The mattress released her slowly, as though reluctant. She pulled on her boots without untying them. She did not look in the mirror. She did not need to. She knew what she would see: the same face she had seen yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, the face that had not changed in twenty-eight years, the face her mother could not look at without flinching.

She opened the bedroom door. The hallway was bright. Sunlight came through the landing window and lay across the runner carpet in a long pale stripe, and the smell of Daisy's perfume, which had preceded her up the stairs, mixed with the lavender and the dust and the faint undertone of the stone walls cooling after the night. Daisy was already at the top of the stairs. She was wearing a cream silk blouse and tailored trousers and shoes that had no business being on a country farm. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that the skin at her temples shone. She looked like a woman arriving for a meeting, not a woman arriving for a funeral, although the funeral had been three days ago and what Daisy had come for now was something else.

"You look terrible," Daisy said.

"Thank you," Margot said.

Daisy surveyed the hallway. Her gaze moved from the peeling wallpaper to the stack of Margot's boxes to the closed door of the room she had claimed. She did not look at the door of Cordelia's room. She looked, Margot noticed, very deliberately, at the small table beneath the landing window, where the folded letter had lain unopened for three days. The letter was gone. The table was bare except for a ring of dust where the envelope had been. Daisy noted the absence. Her mouth tightened by a fraction.

"Margot," Daisy said. "We need to talk about the house."

"Yes," Margot said. "We do."

She walked past Daisy toward the stairs. Daisy did not move. Margot stopped. They stood on the landing, two women in a house that had belonged to a third woman who was no longer there, and the air between them was the same air that had been between Cordelia and Sarah, and between Cordelia and the housekeeper who had not been named, and between Cordelia and the boy in 1981, and between everyone in this house and the things they had not said.

"Not here," Margot said. "Kitchen."

Daisy followed her down. In the kitchen, Margot filled the kettle. She did not offer coffee. Daisy did not ask for any. Margot sat at the table. Daisy sat across from her. The notebook Margot had been using to list the estate's outstanding accounts lay between them, open to a page that said only "Lillian Pace - ?" in red ink. Daisy glanced at it and did not ask.

"The house has to be sold," Daisy said.

"I know," Margot said.

"Good," Daisy said. "I'm glad you see it."

"I see it," Margot said. "I don't agree."

Daisy's fingers, which had been smoothing the surface of the table, stopped.

"Margot," Daisy said, and her voice was the voice she used in boardrooms, the voice that closed deals, the voice that did not invite discussion, "the estate is worth a great deal of money. The land alone, with the lavender, with the outbuildings, with the location, is worth a great deal of money. The house is not livable. The roof leaks. The wiring is from the previous century. The septic system has not been inspected since the year I was born. The contents are, frankly, a liability. I have a buyer in Paris who is interested in the entire parcel. I have been corresponding with his agent for six months. Six months, Margot. While you were here playing house, I was doing the work."

"You were corresponding," Margot said. "You were not doing the work. The work is the harvest. The work is the pruning. The work is waking up at five to check whether the pump has frozen. The work is this." She gestured at the notebook, at the kitchen, at the house.

"The work," Daisy said, "is money. The work is what pays the taxes. The work is what kept this house alive while you were in London pretending not to inherit it."

"I was not pretending," Margot said. "I was not ready."

"You were thirty-six years old," Daisy said. "Grandmother died three days ago. You have been here for three days. In those three days, you have done nothing but wander the house and read old papers and drink. You have not spoken to the solicitor. You have not opened the mail. You have not answered a single email from my agent. You have not even looked at the accounts."

"I have looked at the accounts," Margot said. "There are no accounts. There is a notebook, and a tin, and a letter that should have been sent but wasn't."

"What letter," Daisy said.

Margot did not answer. Daisy waited. The kettle boiled and clicked off and the steam rose and faded and the kitchen was quiet except for the hum of the fridge and the faint sound of a car engine idling in the drive, Daisy's rental, waiting.

"Margot," Daisy said, and now her voice had changed, the boardroom edge gone, and what was underneath was something thinner, something more tired, "I am tired. I am tired of carrying this. I have carried it for ten years. I have paid for the taxes. I have paid for the roof. I have paid for the funeral. I have paid for the solicitor in Paris. I have paid for everything, and I have done it from London, on my salary, while you have been here with the land and the lavender and the house and the memories that you think belong to you alone. They do not belong to you alone. They belong to me. They belonged to Grandmother. They belonged to Mother, before she decided she did not want them. They are ours, Margot. They are not yours."

"They are not yours either," Margot said. "They are Cordelia's. And Cordelia left them to me."

"Cordelia left them to you because you were here," Daisy said. "Cordelia left them to you because I refused to come. Do you think I refused because I didn't want them? I refused because I knew. I knew what would happen. I knew you would stay. I knew you would ruin it. I knew you would let the house fall down around you while you read old letters and talked to ghosts."

"I am not talking to ghosts," Margot said.

"Then what are you doing," Daisy said.

Margot looked at the notebook. She looked at the page that said "Lillian Pace - ?" and she thought about the letter, the letter that Cordelia had written to Lillian Pace in 1986 and had never sent, the letter in which Cordelia had said, "I did not know how to tell you, and so I did not tell you, and the not-telling has been the shape of my life ever since."

She thought about the door in the field, the one that had been bricked up, the one that led to the cellar that had been the housekeeper's rooms, the rooms that had been walled off so that the house could pretend they did not exist. She thought about Lillian Pace, who had raised Cordelia's son, who had been sent away, who had not been invited to the funeral, who was alive, who was in the village, who had answered the door in her slippers and said, "I wondered when you would come."

She thought about Sarah, her mother, who had not come to the funeral either, who was in London, who had not been named in the will, who had not been mentioned by Cordelia in any of the letters Margot had found except once, in 1971, when Cordelia had written, "Sarah will not forgive me, and I will not ask her to."

She thought about the boy in 1981, who had been born in the house and who had been taken away, and who was now a man of forty-two, and whose name Margot did not yet know, but whose existence was written in the house itself, in the bricked door, in the walled rooms, in the letter that had never been sent.

"I am going to the village," Margot said.

Daisy stared at her.

"What," Daisy said.

"I am going to the village," Margot said. "I am going to find Lillian Pace. I am going to ask her what happened. I am going to ask her about the boy. I am going to ask her about the letter. I am going to ask her why she was not at the funeral. And then I am going to come back, and I am going to tell you what she says, and you are going to listen. And after you have listened, we are going to decide what to do. Together. Not in Paris. Not through an agent. Together, in this kitchen, at this table, where Grandmother sat."

Daisy did not move. Her hands were flat on the table. Her jaw was set. The morning light through the kitchen window fell across her shoulders and made her cream blouse glow.

"Margot," she said, and her voice was small now, smaller than Margot had ever heard it, "I am asking you. As your sister. As the person who has paid for everything. I am asking you to let this go. Let the house go. Let the land go. Let the memories go. They are not serving you. They are keeping you here. They are keeping you small. Come home. Come back to London. Come back to your life. There is nothing for you here."

"There is everything for me here," Margot said. "There is the truth."

"The truth," Daisy said, "is that Grandmother was a difficult woman who lived alone in a house that was too big for her and who made choices that hurt people, and who is now dead, and who cannot be helped or hurt or changed by anything we do or do not do. The truth is that the house is falling down. The truth is that the lavender will not pay the taxes next year, or the year after, or ever. The truth is that you are hiding."

"I am not hiding," Margot said.

"You are hiding," Daisy said. "You have been hiding since you were eighteen. You hid in this house when Mother sent you away. You hid in London when you could not bear to come back. You hid behind the counter at the market when you could not bear to look at Grandmother. You are hiding now, behind a notebook and a sprig of lavender and the fantasy that there is some secret that will explain everything."

"There is a secret," Margot said. "There is a woman in the village who raised a child in this house. There is a child who was born here and taken away. There is a letter that Grandmother wrote and did not send. There is a door in the field that was bricked up. These are not fantasies, Daisy. These are facts. These are stones in the wall. These are pages in a notebook. These are the things Grandmother left me."

"She left you a ruin," Daisy said.

"She left me the truth," Margot said. "And I am going to find it."

Daisy stood up. The chair scraped against the stone floor. She did not pick up her bag. She did not move toward the door. She stood there, in the middle of the kitchen, in her cream blouse and her tailored trousers, in her expensive shoes, and she looked at Margot, and for the first time in twenty-eight years, Margot saw her sister's face do something other than arrange itself.

"Margot," Daisy said. "If you go to that village. If you find Lillian Pace. If you open whatever door it is you think you are going to open. You will not be able to close it again. Do you understand? You will not be able to come back from it. The house will not be a house anymore. It will be a museum. It will be a crime scene. It will be the place where we found out what Grandmother did. And we will never be able to look at it the same way. We will never be able to look at each other the same way. We will never be able to look at Mother the same way. Is that what you want?"

"Yes," Margot said.

Daisy sat down. The chair did not scrape this time. She sat down slowly, as though she had become older in the space of a minute, and she put her hands in her lap, and she said nothing.

Margot stood up. She took the notebook from the table. She took the sprig of lavender from her pocket and put it back in the notebook, pressed between the pages like a leaf in a book. She walked to the door. She did not look back.

Outside, the morning was cool. The gravel of the drive crunched under her boots. Daisy's rental sat there, engine still idling, the driver reading something on his phone. Margot walked past it. She walked down the lane, between the lavender fields, which were silver in the early light and smelled of nothing yet because the heat had not drawn the oil from the stems. She walked past the bricked door in the field. She did not look at it. She would look at it later, when she had something to look at it with.

At the end of the lane, the road turned toward the village. The village was a cluster of stone houses around a square, and in the square there was a fountain that had not worked in fifty years, and beside the fountain there was a house with green shutters and a cat on the windowsill and a door that opened before Margot had reached it.

Lillian Pace stood in the doorway. She was wearing the same slippers. She was holding a cup of tea. She looked at Margot, and Margot looked at her, and the morning light fell between them like a long pale stripe, like the light on the landing in Cordelia's house, like the light that had fallen on the table where the letter had lain.

"I wondered," Lillian said, "if you would come alone."

"I came alone," Margot said.

"Good," Lillian said. "Come in. I will tell you what you want to know. I have been waiting thirty-seven years to tell someone who would listen."

Margot stepped across the threshold. The door closed behind her. The village was quiet. The fountain did not work. The cat watched from the windowsill. And in the kitchen of the green-shuttered house, over tea that was strong and bitter and smelled of herbs Margot did not recognize, Lillian Pace began to speak.