“Is it finished?”
“The hearing is,” I said. “The money will take a while.”
“What about Grant?”
“He’s going to prison. He can’t come to our house.”
She looked at Lena. “And you don’t have to see him?”
“No,” Lena said. “I don’t.”
Emily ate one of the biscuits. Then she offered the other to me.
The house by the sea could not be returned. By the time the sale was uncovered, another family had bought it without knowing its history. I went with Emily to see it once, before deciding whether to tell her the whole story. The road narrowed between hedges, and then the water appeared, gray beneath a clear sky. The house had blue shutters. A pair of small shoes stood outside its door.
Emily looked at the shoes and said, “Someone lives here.”
“Yes.”
“Did Mom?”
“When she was little. She wanted you to know about it.”
We stood at the end of the lane for a few minutes. Emily picked up a smooth stone and put it in her pocket. On the drive home, she asked whether Clara had liked the sea in winter. I told her how Clara used to insist on walking the beach when the wind was strong enough to turn her umbrella inside out. Emily laughed. She had heard stories about her mother before, but this was the first one she had asked me to tell again.
As the money was recovered, I put it into an account only Emily and I could access, with Ms. Bell reviewing the paperwork. We fixed the back fence and paid Lena for every day she had missed while her wrist healed. She argued about it until I told her that Emily had already made a list of things they would do when she came back: paint the paper town, visit the library, make the cake promised by the bakery.
Lena returned on a rainy Tuesday. Emily met her at the door with an apron in each hand. They spent the afternoon in the kitchen and used every bowl we owned. When I came home, there was flour on the floor and a crooked cake cooling on the rack. Lena seemed nervous until I asked for a slice. Emily cut me one so large it fell sideways on the plate.
Later, when the dishes were done, Lena asked if I had read Clara’s note. I had kept it in the envelope all those months. I knew its first line by heart, but each time I tried to go farther, I saw Grant’s name on the documents beneath it and put everything away.
That evening I took the note upstairs. Emily followed me into Clara’s workroom. We had cleared the damaged drawer and left the rest as it was: jars of pencils, rolls of paper, a small clock that had stopped years ago. Emily sat on the floor while I unfolded the page.
Clara had written about the house, the account, and her fear that she would not have time to settle either properly. She wanted me to call Ms. Bell. She wanted Emily’s money kept for Emily. I read those lines aloud, slowly. Then I came to a second sheet, folded so closely behind the first that I had taken them for one.
It was addressed to Emily.
I asked whether she wanted me to read it. She nodded, but moved nearer before I began.
Clara wrote that she had bought a small blue notebook and asked Lena, who had helped us during Clara’s final months, to keep it until Emily was old enough to use it. The notebook was for ordinary afternoons. Clara knew birthdays would be remembered. She worried more about the days between them, when Emily might want to tell someone a small thing that had happened and find that her mother was not there to hear it.
Lena had never mentioned a notebook. Emily was staring at her knees.
“Do you know where it is?” I asked.
She stood, went to her room, and came back carrying a blue notebook worn soft at the corners. Lena had given it to her on her seventh birthday. Emily said she thought I knew.
Its pages held a year of tiny entries. Some were drawings. Others recorded spelling tests, a scraped knee, the day Mrs. Alvarez let her water the tomatoes. On a page from the week before Grant came to our house, Emily had drawn our front door. Beneath it she had written, I wish we had more time before dinner.
The next page had a drawing of a little box tied with a ribbon. Emily saw me looking at it and took the notebook gently from my hands.
“I was going to get you chocolates,” she said. “Lena said we could go after school that day. I wanted them to be a surprise because you always came home tired.”
I looked at her. “We both thought of the same thing?”
She nodded. “Mom wrote in the front that sometimes you bought her chocolates when you got home early.”
I turned back to the first page. Clara’s writing filled the inside cover. She had described an afternoon years before Emily was born, when I arrived unexpectedly with a box of chocolates after a day she had thought would never end. She had kept the ribbon for months, tucked into the kitchen drawer. I remembered the drawer and the ribbon. I had forgotten the afternoon.
Emily traced the drawing she had made. On the day she screamed, she had been waiting to choose chocolates for me. I had come through the door carrying them for her.
“I wish it had been a nice day,” she said.
“So do I.”
She closed the notebook. “Can it still have a nice part?”
I thought about the half chocolate she had shared with me that night, with both of us too frightened to sleep. “It already did.”
Emily leaned against my side. We stayed in Clara’s workroom until the light faded and we could no longer read the pages. Then we took the notebook downstairs and found a place for it on the kitchen shelf, where Emily could reach it whenever she had something to add.
By spring, Lena’s wrist had stopped aching in the mornings. Mrs. Alvarez had more tomato seedlings than her windowsill could hold, so Emily planted three in our garden. We visited the sea again, choosing a beach where we could walk for as long as we pleased. Emily carried the smooth stone from the lane in her coat pocket. At the water’s edge she took it out, held it in her palm for a moment, then brought it home.
One afternoon I left work early without telling anyone at the house. I stopped for bread and a box of chocolates, and when I opened the front door I heard Lena laughing in the kitchen. Emily was trying to explain a game she had invented; Mrs. Alvarez was there too, objecting to a rule that seemed to change whenever Emily was losing.
Emily heard my key and came running. She stopped when she saw the box, then reached behind her back and produced one of her own. Hers had a green ribbon and had clearly spent the walk home at the bottom of her school bag.
For a moment we stood in the hall holding out our gifts. Lena called that dinner would be ready soon. Mrs. Alvarez asked whether either box contained the ones with orange filling.
