The county transit van wheezed to a stop at the hollow's only marker, its brakes squealing against the salted asphalt of late September. The driver, a man whose name tag read something unreadable beneath a coffee ring, twisted in his seat and offered Wren Bellamy a nod that managed to be both sympathetic and relieved. The relief was honest. The van's schedule had ended fifteen minutes ago at the Clam and Canvas, the only other stop, and Wren had been the reason it was still idling at the edge of town.
"That's you, miss," he said, gesturing with a thumb toward the cracked passenger window. "Whole welcome committee's right there."
Wren followed his gaze. There was no committee. There was a crooked wooden sign, sun-faded and listing slightly to the right, that read Welcome to Piper Hollow in hand-painted letters. She had helped paint that sign in the eighth grade, back when her hands were smaller and her certainty about belonging anywhere was still intact. The N in Welcome had been hers. She had insisted on doing it, standing on an overturned crate while the boys held the board steady and the late afternoon light turned the wet paint gold.
She shifted the duffel bag higher on her shoulder and tightened her grip on the key in her palm. The metal was warm from being held too long.
"Much obliged," she said, and her voice came out rougher than she intended. She cleared her throat. "Thank you. For the detour."
The driver waved a hand. "Your aunt would've skinned me if I'd left her niece standing at the curb." He paused, his eyes meeting hers in the rearview mirror. "She was good people, your aunt. The whole town felt it when she passed."
Wren managed a smile that felt like cardboard. The van doors shuddered open, and the smell of the hollow rushed in: salt and pine, a faint undertone of low tide, the diesel residue of the van itself fading behind the briny breeze. She stepped down onto the pavement, and the soles of her boots met ground that she had walked a thousand times before. The hollow did not feel like homecoming. It felt like a test she had not studied for.
The van pulled away with a reluctant groan of gears, leaving her alone with the sign and the salt air. She stood for a moment, listening to the silence that followed mechanical sound. A gull cried somewhere beyond the breakwater. Wind moved through the wild rose hedge that bordered the small parking area, rattling dry hips against the wooden railing.
The key in her palm was not a metaphor. It was the actual key to the screen door of her late aunt's porch, handed to her three days ago by a lawyer who had smelled of pipe smoke and old paper. The house was hers now, along with everything inside it that her aunt had not specifically bequeathed to other parties. The thought made her chest tight in a way she did not want to examine.
She turned toward the road that wound down toward the center of town. The pavement was broken here and there by frost heaves and the roots of old maples, their leaves just beginning to turn at the edges. In another week the whole valley would be a postcard of reds and golds. Wren had always loved autumn in the hollow, but right now the impending riot of color felt like a promise being made to someone who had not asked for one.
Her phone buzzed in her back pocket. She fished it out and saw Marigold Tate's name on the screen, followed by a string of messages that arrived in rapid succession, the way Marigold spoke in life.
You're there yet? Don't make me come down there. Okay I'm coming down there. Wait. Are you at the sign? I can see the parking lot from my upstairs window. Don't move. I'm putting shoes on. That was a lie. I'm already wearing shoes. But now I'm putting on DIFFERENT shoes because the first pair are clogs and clogs are not appropriate for emotional reunions.
Wren exhaled through her nose. A small sound, almost a laugh, almost not. She typed back with her thumb, one-handed, the duffel bag sliding dangerously on her shoulder.
I'm at the sign. I haven't even made it past the sign. I think the sign is judging me.
The response came before she could pocket the phone.
The sign has no opinion. The sign is made of wood and poor craftsmanship. It was YOUR craftsmanship. Stop procrastinating and WALK.
Wren pocketed the phone. She looked at the sign again. The N in Welcome was a little lopsided, the way letters painted by twelve-year-olds often are. She had tried to fix it at the time, and someone, probably Aunt Tabitha, had told her that fixing the first attempt was how you ruined it. The advice had applied to more than signs.
She started walking. The road dipped and curved, the way the hollow's roads always did, following old paths worn by generations of feet and cart wheels. The houses here were mostly older than the century, their clapboards weathered to that particular grey that coastal salt air produces. Window boxes held the last of the summer geraniums, defiant pink against the encroaching rust of season. Somewhere a dog barked twice and fell silent. The air smelled of woodsmoke from a chimney she couldn't see, and underneath that, the eternal iodine breath of the sea.
She passed the old Grange hall, its windows shuttered, the community board out front displaying a flyer for a Founders' Day planning meeting that had already happened. The flyer was curling at the edges, its corners lifting in the breeze. She resisted the urge to stop and pin it back. That had been Aunt Tabitha's job, before. Now it was no one's job, or everyone's, which often meant no one's.
The thought caught in her throat. She kept walking.
The key in her palm had warmed to body temperature, indistinguishable from her skin. She transferred it to her other hand, then back again, a restless motion that accomplished nothing except confirming that she was, in fact, holding a key. She knew what it opened. She knew what waited on the other side of the door. She had been inside the house a hundred times. She had slept in the back bedroom during summer visits, helped Aunt Tabitha can tomatoes in the small kitchen, learned to shuck corn on the porch steps while gulls wheeled overhead. The house was not foreign. The house was the problem precisely because it was so familiar, and because now it was hers in a way that made her feel like an intruder in her own memory.
Halfway down the hill, she heard footsteps behind her. Fast. Purposeful. Accompanied by a voice that carried the way only one voice in Piper Hollow carried.
"Wren Bellamy, if you walk into that house without me, I will never forgive you. And I mean that. I have a very long memory for slights, real and imagined."
Wren stopped. She turned. Marigold Tate was striding up the road toward her, a jacket thrown over what appeared to be a flour-dusted apron, her dark hair pulled back in a knot that was already losing its structural integrity. In one hand she carried a paper bag that rustled when she moved. In the other she carried a thermos.
"You didn't have to," Wren began.
"I absolutely did. Do you know what this town is like when someone returns from the mainland after a funeral? They descend like gulls on a bait bucket. Everyone wants a piece. Everyone wants to tell you how sorry they are, which is fine, the first three times, and after that it becomes a competition in grief theater. I am here to run interference."
Marigold reached her, slightly out of breath, and stood there with her hands on her hips, surveying Wren with the critical eye of someone who had known her since the second grade and had therefore seen every version of her that existed.
"You look terrible," Marigold announced.
"Thanks. You look like you fell into a bakery."
"Almost. It was a bouquet emergency. Three weddings this weekend, all wanting cream roses that are out of season. I told them cream roses in September are an act of optimism, not floristry. They didn't listen. Nobody ever listens." Marigold thrust the paper bag toward her. "Sandwich. Eat it before we get there. You won't want to eat after."
"After what?"
"After you walk through that door." Marigold's voice softened, just slightly, just enough. "It's going to hit you. The smell. The way the light comes through the kitchen window in the afternoon. All of it. It hits everyone differently. Eat the sandwich."
Wren took the bag. She pulled out a wax-paper-wrapped bundle that smelled of good bread and something sharp and green, arugula probably. She unwrapped it and took a bite. It was good. It was exactly the kind of food Marigold would make for someone in crisis, hearty and unfussy and slightly too much.
"You're a disaster," Marigold said, but fondly. "Come on. I'll walk with you. And I'll tell you who's been asking about you, so you're not blindsided."
"Has it been that obvious?"
"You sent a forwarding address to the post office and a change-of-address form to the historical society in the same week. Half the town knew you were coming before the lawyer called you. The other half figured it out from the way Del Royster has been prowling around the hardware store like he's expecting a storm. He doesn't do that for just anyone."
Wren stopped chewing. "Del has been prowling?"
"That's what I said. Don't read into it. He probably just wants to sell you something. A welcome mat. A new mailbox. A small retaining wall. He builds things when he doesn't know what to do with his hands. He has been building things at an alarming rate for the past two weeks. The lumber yard is wondering if they've undercharged him."
Wren resumed walking, Marigold falling into step beside her. The road leveled out here, the houses closer together, the sense of village compressing into something denser. She could see the harbor in the distance, masts tilting gently against the grey sky. The church steeple rose above the rooflines, its weathervane a black arrow pointing toward open water.
"I don't know what to say to people," Wren said, quieter now. "When they tell me they were sorry about Aunt Tabitha. I don't know the right words back. It feels like I should have some prepared response, something that acknowledges their kindness and closes the conversation neatly, but I never have it."
"You say thank you," Marigold said. "That's it. You say thank you, and you mean it, and you move on. The people here aren't expecting a speech. They just want to know you heard them."
They turned the corner onto Harbor Road, and there it was, set back from the street behind a low stone wall and a hedge of Rosa rugosa that had grown ragged with the season. The house. Tabitha Hale's house. Wren's house now, legally and irreversibly, though the legality of it had not yet settled into her understanding.
It was a small Cape, painted the colour of faded custard, with black shutters that needed painting and a front porch that listed gently to the left. The screen door was closed. The storm door beyond it stood ajar, the way Tabitha had always left it, so the cat could come and go. The cat in question, an ancient ginger tom named Boots, sat on the porch railing like a small orange sentinel, his tail wrapped neatly around his paws, watching the street with the regal indifference of a creature who had outlived several administrations.
"Boots is still there," Wren said, surprised.
"Del's been feeding him. And by feeding him I mean Del has been showing up twice a day with a tin of something fancy that he claims is for the cat but is clearly also for himself, because he sits on the porch steps and eats half of it. I've seen him. The whole town has seen him. He doesn't realize he's become a public spectacle of grief."
Wren stopped at the gate. The iron latch was cold under her fingers. Beyond it, the path to the porch was lined with sea lavender that had gone to seed, the purple bracts dry and whispering. She did not open the gate. She stood there, the duffel bag sliding down her arm, the sandwich forgotten in her other hand, and looked at the house that had been her second home since she was small.
The kitchen window faced the street. In the late afternoon light, she could see the shape of the room beyond the glass: the old table, the blue and white curtains Aunt Tabitha had hemmed by hand, the row of copper pots that had not hung straight since the storm of '06. The room looked exactly as it had when Wren had last been here, seven months ago, helping her aunt sort through a lifetime of papers and bric-a-brac with the half-hearted efficiency of someone who suspected the task would never truly be finished.
It had not been finished. It would never be finished. And now it was hers to finish or abandon or carry forward, whichever she could bear.
"Wren," Marigold said, not unkindly. "You don't have to go in today."
"Yes I do."
"Then at least let me come with you."
Wren looked at her. Marigold's face was composed into that particular expression of determined tenderness that she wore when she was trying not to show how much she cared. They had been friends since the sandbox, had gone through the terrible machinery of adolescence together, had drifted apart and come back together more times than either of them could count. Marigold had been the one to call, the night of the funeral, when Wren had been too frozen to dial out herself. Marigold had arranged the reception at the Clam and Canvas without being asked. Marigold had driven the hour to the mainland to retrieve Wren's coat from the hotel when Wren had forgotten it, forgotten everything, in the fog of those first days.
"Alright," Wren said. "Come with me."
She opened the gate. The hinges protested softly, a sound she had heard a thousand times. She walked up the path, Boots watching her approach with the slow blink of a cat who recognized her but had not yet decided whether to acknowledge it. The porch steps creaked under her boots. She stood before the screen door, the key finally transferred to her right hand, and looked through the mesh at the door beyond.
The door was blue. Aunt Tabitha had painted it the summer Wren turned sixteen, the summer her mother had first gotten sick, the summer Wren had spent more time at this house than her own. Tabitha had stood on a stepladder with a brush in her mouth and two colours of paint on her hands, and she had asked Wren, who was sitting on the porch with a book she wasn't reading, what colour the door should be. Wren had said blue, because blue was the colour of the harbour in the morning, the colour of the sky when it had not yet decided what kind of day to be. Tabitha had nodded, paint in her hair, and painted the door the colour of beginnings.
The key slid into the lock. It turned with the ease of a lock that had been oiled recently, which meant someone, probably Del, had been maintaining the small things. The door swung open. The screen door followed, its spring pulling it gently shut behind her.
The smell hit her first. Lavender, from the sachets Tabitha kept in every drawer. Old wood. The faint ghost of woodsmoke from the stove in the kitchen. And underneath, something sweeter and sadder, the smell of a house that had been lived in by one person for forty years and was now, abruptly, empty of that person's presence.
Wren set her duffel bag on the porch floor. She did not step inside yet. She stood on the threshold, one hand on the doorframe, the other at her side, and breathed.
Marigold came up behind her, paper bag crinkling, thermos clutched like a talisman, and put a hand on Wren's shoulder. She said nothing. There was nothing to say. The house waited, patient and full of memory, and Wren Bellamy stood at its door, thirty-seven years old, an orphan twice over, the owner of a key and a legacy she had not chosen but could not refuse.
Marigold let her hand drop from Wren's shoulder after a moment, then stepped past her into the house without waiting for an invitation, the way she had stepped into Tabitha Hale's house a thousand times before, the way she intended to step into it a thousand times again.
"Boots," she called, her voice brisk and carrying. "Boots, where are you hiding, you terrible old thing."
There was a rustle from somewhere deeper in the house, a small affronted sound, and then a cat appeared in the hallway, orange and white and enormously round, his tail held at the regal vertical of a creature who had been expecting company and was prepared to forgive its lateness. Boots stopped when he saw Wren. His ears went forward. He made a noise that was not quite a meow and not quite a chirp, a sound of recognition and reproach, and he walked slowly toward her, each step a small ceremony of welcome.
Wren knelt. The wood of the porch was cool through the knees of her jeans. She held out a hand, and Boots came forward to bump his head against her knuckles, hard, the way he always did, the way he had done since he was a kitten she had helped Tabitha pick out from a cardboard box behind the post office, back when Boots had fit in one palm and Wren had been twenty-three and had not yet learned what it meant to lose things.
"Hey, you," she said, her voice low and rough. "Yeah. I know. I'm late."
Boots permitted himself to be scratched behind the ears for exactly four seconds, then turned and walked back into the house, expecting them to follow.
Marigold had already found the kettle. She had also found the canister of sweet tea mix in the cupboard above the stove, the same canister Tabitha had kept there for as long as Wren could remember, labeled in her mother's careful block print: SWEET TEA MIX, FOR MARIGOLD, FOR WHEN SHE FORGETS TO BEHAVE.
"She left that for me," Marigold said, holding up the canister. "She told me last spring. She said, Marigold, when I am gone, you will come into this kitchen looking for the kettle, and you will find this, and you will know I was thinking of you."
Wren stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched her friend measure the mix into two glasses with the precision of a woman who had made this tea a thousand times and refused, on principle, to ever get the ratio wrong. The kettle began to hiss. The afternoon light came through the window above the sink and fell in a long pale stripe across the linoleum, the same linoleum that had been there when Wren was small, the same pale yellow, worn at the threshold where her mother's feet had crossed and recrossed for forty years.
"We should go to the diner," Wren said.
Marigold looked up. "No."
"I should go to the diner. I should see the place."
"You should sit down," Marigold said. "You should drink this. You should let Boots sit on your lap, because he is already winding around your ankles and he will not forgive you if you refuse. And in twenty minutes, when you have remembered how to breathe, I will drive you to Marigold's, which is what the diner is called now, and I will feed you, and you will tell me everything you have not been telling me, and I will tell you everything you need to know."
"I don't need to know anything."
"Wren." Marigold set the glass down in front of her. "Sit."
Wren sat.
Boots, who had indeed been winding around her ankles, who had timed his approach to coincide with the moment she was most in need of something warm and round and undemanding, leaped into her lap with the dignity of a small furry dignitary. He turned once. He turned twice. He settled. His purr started up, a low mechanical rumble that Wren felt through the cotton of her shirt, through the bones of her thighs, into the base of her spine.
"There," Marigold said, softer now, and sat down across from her. "Now. Talk to me."
But Wren did not talk, not at first. She sat in her mother's kitchen, in the chair her mother had always sat in, with the cat in her lap and the sweet tea sweating against her palm and the light falling in that long pale stripe across the floor, and she let the house settle around her. She let the silence be the silence of an afternoon in late August in a coastal town in Maine, where the fog came in on its own schedule and the gulls screamed at nothing in particular and the lobster boats went out at four in the morning and came back at nine, weather permitting, which it always did, or almost always, which was close enough.
The clock above the stove ticked. Boots purred. Marigold waited, which was not, historically, one of her strengths.
"Diner first," Wren said finally. "I want to see it."
Marigold studied her face for a long moment, the way she studied arrangements before she committed them to a vase, looking for the line of least resistance, the place where something might give. Whatever she saw made her nod.
"Diner first," she agreed. "But you let me drive."
"I can drive."
"You have not slept on a plane in eleven hours. You drove from the airport. You are running on caffeine and stubbornness and the fumes of your own anxiety. You let me drive."
Wren opened her mouth to argue. She closed it. She took a sip of the sweet tea, which was exactly right, which was the taste of every summer of her childhood, which was the taste of Tabitha Hale standing in this kitchen with a canister labeled FOR MARIGOLD and a knowing look in her eye.
"Fine," she said.
Boots, sensing motion, leaped down from her lap with a soft thud and preceded them to the door.
Marigold's truck was parked at the curb, the same truck she had driven since college, a faded red pickup with a flower of every color of the visible spectrum painted on the tailgate in a style that could only be described as aggressive. Wren climbed into the passenger side. Marigold climbed into the driver's side. Boots climbed into the back, where he sat on an old folded quilt and stared forward with the resigned patience of a cat who had made this journey many times and did not require entertainment.
The truck started on the second try. Marigold pulled away from the curb, and the house receded in the side mirror, smaller than Wren remembered, or perhaps she was simply larger than she had been, which was certainly true.
The drive from Tabitha's house to Main Street took four minutes if you obeyed the speed limit, which Marigold did only when there was a marked cruiser in the vicinity. Today there was no cruiser, so the truck rolled through the side streets with the unhurried confidence of a woman who had lived here all her life and intended to live here all the rest of it, and who considered the speed limit a suggestion made by people who did not have to get anywhere in particular.
Wren watched the town go by. The library, which had a new roof and a fresh coat of white paint on the columns. The post office, which had been the post office since before she was born and would be the post office after she was gone. The hardware store, where her father had bought the hinges for the screen door, the same hardware store where Tobiah Tate had worked summers in high school, which was a piece of information that Marigold had never once volunteered and which Wren had never once forgotten.
The diner came into view at the end of Main, where Main bent toward the harbour and the harbour bent toward the sea. It looked smaller, or perhaps Wren was simply larger, which she was. The neon sign had been replaced. The windows had been repainted, a deep blue-green that was almost the color of the water at certain hours. A new awning extended over the sidewalk, canvas in a soft marigold yellow, and on it, in a font that was somehow both elegant and inviting, the name.
MARIGOLDS.
"Oh," Wren said, very quietly.
Marigold parked the truck directly in front of the diner, in a spot that was marked NO PARKING between the hours of four and six, which was the precise window in which they had arrived, because Marigold had planned this, because Marigold always planned this.
"Come on," she said, and climbed out, and came around to open Wren's door, which was a courtesy she had never once offered Wren in twenty years of friendship, which meant she was worried, which meant Wren was in worse shape than she had thought.
Boots leaped down from the back of the truck and led the way to the door, which was unlocked, which meant Marigold had a key, which meant she was here often enough to require one.
Inside, the diner had been preserved and reimagined at the same time. The counter was still there, the long sweep of it with its chrome edge and its swivel stools, but the stools had been reupholstered in a soft leather the color of butter, and the counter top had been replaced with something that looked like marble but was probably not marble because Marigold was many things but a fool about money was not one of them. The booths along the wall were new, but they had been built to look old, the kind of deliberate agedness that cost a great deal of money and looked as if it had happened by accident. The windows let in the late afternoon light. The smell of the place was the smell of the place had always been, coffee and griddle grease and the faint sweetness of pie crust, and underneath it now, something else, something floral, something that Wren identified, after a moment, as Marigold's signature scent, which she wore in the shop and apparently had begun to wear here as well.
"Sit," Marigold said, and gestured toward a booth in the back, the booth that had been their booth when they were teenagers, the booth where Wren had first told Marigold she wanted to be a writer, the booth where Marigold had first told Wren she wanted to open a flower shop, the booth where neither of them had ever sat with Tobiah Tate because Tobiah had always preferred the counter, where he could watch the door, which was a thing Wren had only recently understood.
They sat. Boots, who had walked the length of the diner with the proprietary air of a small landlord, leaped onto the bench beside Wren and settled, pressing his warm round body against her hip. Marigold disappeared behind the counter and returned with two glasses of sweet tea, freshly poured, the ice already beginning to melt at the edges.
"Don't talk yet," she said, and slid into the booth across from Wren. "Drink. Look around. Then talk."
Wren looked around.
The blackboard above the counter, which had once listed the daily specials in Del Royster's careful cursive, had been repainted, and the specials were now in Marigold's handwriting, which was not careful and was not cursive but was, in its own way, unmistakable. The clock above the kitchen door had been replaced with one that was shaped like a sunflower, which was, Wren decided, extremely on brand. The pie case at the end of the counter had been expanded, and behind the glass stood a row of pies that looked like they had been baked by someone who understood pie as a serious undertaking.
The bell above the door rang.
Del Royster walked in, carrying a small paper bag, the way he had walked in a thousand times before, his coveralls still on, his boots still leaving faint prints of sawdust on the floor. He saw Marigold first. He saw Wren second.
He stopped.
He set the paper bag on the nearest table, very carefully, the way a man sets down something he is not yet ready to release.
"Well," he said.
Wren stood up. Boots made a sound of protest and was ignored.
"Hi, Del."
He came toward her slowly, the way a man approaches something he has been waiting a long time to see. He stopped a foot away. He looked at her for a long moment, his face doing the thing it always did, the thing that was not quite a smile and not quite a frown but a third thing, a thing that lived between them, the expression of a man who had known her since she was a baby and had outlived, by some cruel arithmetic, everyone who had known her longer.
"You look like her," he said, finally. "Around the eyes."
Wren's throat closed. She nodded.
Del nodded back. He reached out and squeezed her shoulder, once, firmly, the way he had squeezed her father's shoulder at the funeral, the way a man squeezes a shoulder when he does not have the words and is not going to pretend he does.
Then he picked up his paper bag, and he came to the booth, and he sat down on the bench beside Marigold without asking, and he said, "I brought you a pie. Blueberry. Your mother's recipe. Tabitha gave it to me in April and told me to bake it for you when you came home, and I have been baking it every week since, and freezing them, and this is the last one I had in the freezer, so you will eat it, and you will tell me if it is right."
"Del," Wren said.
"Eat it," he said.
Marigold was already up, already behind the counter, already slicing the pie into three generous pieces, and setting each piece on a small white plate, and bringing the plates to the booth with a fork in each hand, because Marigold Tate had never in her life allowed a pie to go unserved when there were people in the room who needed to be fed.
They ate. The pie was right. The pie was exactly right, the crust flaky and the berries bright and the sugar balanced exactly the way Tabitha had balanced it, which meant Del had followed the recipe to the letter, which meant Del had taken the recipe seriously, which meant Del had understood, as Marigold had understood, that this was not a pie but a letter, and Wren was the only one who could read it.
Boots, who had been watching from the booth, climbed down and wound once around Wren's ankles, then returned to his seat, satisfied.
The bell above the door did not ring again. The light through the windows began to lean toward gold. Somewhere in the kitchen, a pot of coffee began to perk, set on by Marigold's hand at some point, with the unerring instinct of a woman who knew when coffee would be required.
Wren set down her fork. She looked at Marigold. She looked at Del.
"Tell me," she said. "Whatever it is you have been keeping from me. Tell me now."
Marigold set her coffee cup down with the careful precision of a woman buying time. The small ceramic clink against the saucer was the loudest sound in the diner.
"It is not my story to tell," she said.
"Then whose is it?"
Marigold looked at Del. Del looked at the counter. The coffee pot in the kitchen gave a soft hiss, a small mechanical sigh.
"It is mine, I reckon," Del said. "It has been mine for thirty years, and I would have kept it mine till I died, but Tabitha told me to tell you, and Tabitha always knew when the time had come, and Tabitha was almost never wrong."
He folded his hands on the table. His knuckles were swollen, the skin thin and spotted with age, and Wren saw for the first time that his hands were trembling, very slightly, the way a leaf trembles in a wind that has not yet reached it.
"Your mother came to the bakery on a Tuesday in the spring of 1994," he said. "March, I think. It might have been April. She had flour on her dress, which I noticed because she was always careful about her clothes, your mother, careful in a way I never managed to be. She had flour on her dress and she asked for a dozen doughnuts, plain, and when I put them in the box she said, 'I need to ask you something, and you need to answer me honestly, because I am about to do a very foolish thing and I need at least one person in this town who will not lie to me about it.'"
He paused. He looked at Wren.
"I have thought about that Tuesday every week for thirty years," he said. "I have thought about it when I was rolling dough and when I was washing trays and when I was sitting in this very booth. I have thought about it so many times that I have worn the memory smooth, the way you smooth a stone, and I can no longer tell you which parts are what she said and which parts are what I remember her saying, and which parts are what I have told myself she must have said, because the story needed her to have said them."
Wren did not speak. The diner was very quiet. Boots had stopped purring and was watching Del with the unblinking attention of a creature who understood that something important was happening, even if he did not understand what.
"She was pregnant," Del said. "She had been pregnant for about two months, she thought, though she had not seen a doctor yet. She had not told your father. She had not told anyone. She had come to me because, she said, I was the only person in this town who had ever done anything brave and foolish in equal measure, and she needed to talk to someone who would understand."
Marigold put her hand on the table. She did not look at Wren. She looked at the window, at the gold light slanting through it, at the dust motes turning slowly in the beam.
"She asked me if I thought she was making a terrible mistake," Del said. "I told her I did not know. I told her that was not the kind of question a baker could answer. I told her that what I could tell her was that my sister had done the same thing in 1967, and that my sister had never regretted it, and that my sister had raised a fine son who was now an accountant in Portland and who sent her a card every Mother's Day without fail."
He stopped. He picked up his coffee cup, and then he set it down again, because his hand was shaking too much.
"I did not ask her who the father was," he said. "I did not ask her what she planned to do. I did not ask her anything. I gave her the doughnuts and I told her to come back when she had made her decision, and if she needed someone to talk to, I would be here."
Wren's throat was tight. She could feel her own heartbeat in her wrists, in the soft skin behind her ears, in the place where her collarbones met.
"She came back," Del said. "She came back three days later, on a Friday, and she told me she had decided to keep the baby. She told me she had told your father, and he had said he would marry her, and she had said yes, and they were going to be married in June. She told me her father was going to disown her, which he did, and her mother was going to cry for a week, which she did, and her sister was going to be furious for about a year, which she was, and that none of that mattered because she had decided, and she was at peace with it."
He looked at Wren.
"And then she asked me if I would be the baby's godfather," he said. "She asked me that in this booth, on a Friday afternoon, and I said yes, and I have been trying to live up to that yes for thirty years, and I am not sure I have done it very well, but I have tried, and I would like you to know that I have tried."
Wren reached across the table. She took his hand. His fingers were cold, and the skin was papery, and the bones beneath felt like the small smooth bones of a bird.
"You have," she said. "You have done it very well."
Marigold sniffed. She did not look away from the window. Her jaw was set in the way that Wren had seen a thousand times, the way that meant she was holding something in and she intended to hold it for as long as humanly possible.
"There is more," Del said. "There is not more about that. There is more about the letter."
"The letter," Wren said.
"The letter that was in the book," Del said. "The letter that you have not read yet, because Marigold told me you had not read it, and I have been thinking about that letter for a month now, ever since Tabitha told me it existed, and I need to tell you what I know about it, which is not much, but which is something."
He took a breath.
"Tabitha came to see me in August," he said. "She came to the bakery, on a Tuesday, which was the day she always came, because Tuesdays were slow and she liked the quiet. She sat in this booth, and she ordered coffee, and she told me she had been to a doctor, and the doctor had told her something she had suspected for a while, and she was going to tell you, but she was not going to tell you yet, because she wanted to finish something first."
"Finish what," Wren said.
"The letter," Del said. "She said she had started a letter to you the year you were born, and she had been adding to it ever since, and she wanted to finish it before she told you she was sick. She said the letter was the only thing she had to give you that was truly hers, and she wanted it to be right."
He paused. He looked at his hands.
"She asked me if I would keep it for her," he said. "She said she did not trust herself to keep it, because she was the kind of woman who might read it again and decide to change something, and she did not want to change anything. She said she wanted it to be exactly what it was, word for word, the day she finished it."
He looked at Wren.
"I told her I would," he said. "I told her to bring it to me when it was done, and I would put it in the safe at the bakery, and I would give it to you when the time came. She said that was what she wanted. She said thank you. She finished her coffee. She went home."
He stopped.