*In Loving Memory of Howard Pomeroy (1949–2024) — "He remembered everything this town tried to forget."*
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The viewing went wrong in the way viewings always go wrong when the foundation cracks — quietly, and then all at once.
Eleanor had managed the flowers. She had managed the temperature, resetting the climate control from Margot's careless sixty-eight degrees back to the precise sixty-four that preserved cosmetics and kept casket lids from warping. She had managed Howard Pomeroy's wife, who had wept for forty minutes on Eleanor's shoulder in the family room, leaving a damp print on the shoulder of Eleanor's blazer that she did not acknowledge and did not change. She had managed the guest registry, the prayer cards, the parking flow, and the specific placement of the flag that Howard had earned in Vietnam and that his daughter had insisted be draped at a particular angle that contradicted every protocol Eleanor knew.
She had not managed, however, to leave.
It was now past ten in the evening. The mourners had gone. Howard lay in his casket in the darkened viewing room, draped and sealed, waiting for tomorrow's graveside. The funeral home smelled of residual lily perfume — the Casablancas Eleanor had salvaged, their edges still browned despite her efforts, like sunburn on pale skin — and of the lemon polish she had applied to every wooden surface in the building, as if she could sand away the thirty-six hours she had spent at Cora Whitfield's bed-and-breakfast, staring at a ceiling that smelled faintly of lavender and old decisions.
She was in the preparation room, still in her blazer, reviewing the Pomeroy file by the light of a single lamp, when the argument found her.
"You can't just sit there."
Margot's voice preceded her body, arriving in the hallway before her footsteps did. She appeared in the doorway wearing yesterday's clothes — the cream silk blouse wrinkled now, the tailored trousers creased at the knees — with her auburn curls pulled into a knot that was coming undone. She held her phone in one hand like a weapon.
Eleanor did not look up. "I'm reviewing the military honors protocol for tomorrow. The daughter wants a twenty-one-gun salute, and the VFW only authorized three. Someone has to manage expectations."
"Ruth Anne Covington gave us a deadline, Eleanor."
The name landed like a stone dropped into still water. Eleanor's pen stopped moving. She finished writing the number *three* on the line beside *flag presentation* before she set it down.
"I'm aware of the deadline."
"Are you? Because you left. You *left*, and while you were gone, Callie and I have been—"
"Doing what, exactly?" Eleanor looked up now, and her gray-green eyes were the color of lake ice in February. "The lilies were rotting. The climate was off. Callie was upstairs reading Grandmother's journal like it was a *novel* instead of—"
"Instead of what? Instead of the thing that might tell us what happened to Mom?"
The silence that followed was architectural. It held the room together.
Eleanor stood. The movement was precise, controlled, the way she did everything — as if even her body were a logistical decision. She closed the Pomeroy file and aligned it with the edge of the desk.
"That journal," she said carefully, "is Grandmother's private reflection. It is not a roadmap."
"You haven't even read it."
"I don't need to."
Margot laughed — the sharp, bright laugh she deployed when something hurt too much for honesty. "Right. Because you already know everything, don't you? You were always the one who *knew*. The one who *stayed*. The one who got to hold Grandma's hand while the rest of us—"
"This isn't about the journal." Eleanor's voice was level. "This is about Ruth Anne's deadline, which is a business matter, and business matters require clear heads, not—"
"Not what? Not hope?" Callie's voice came from the hallway. Soft. Almost a whisper. But it carried.
She appeared behind Margot like a ghost — which, in this house full of ghosts, seemed appropriate. Her locs were pulled back with a fraying elastic, and she wore the same layered clothing she'd been wearing for two days, the fabric soft and wrinkled. She held Della's leather journal in one hand and, in the other, a photograph she had pulled from its pages.
Her brown eyes were red-rimmed but steady. She looked, Eleanor thought with a pang she immediately suppressed, like their mother.
"I need to show you something," Callie said.
"I don't want to see it."
"You need to see it."
"Callie—"
She held up the photograph. It was creased down the middle, faded, the colors shifted toward amber. In it, a woman stood on a porch — not this porch, but a porch — with her hand raised against the sun, shielding her eyes. She was smiling. Her hair was dark and loose past her shoulders. Behind her, a house that wasn't in Larkspur sat with its windows lit gold.
Margot made a sound. A small, broken sound that she covered by pressing her knuckles to her lips.
"The address is on the back," Callie said. "Springfield. It's a real address — a real house. Margot, this is recent. This is *her*."
Eleanor stared at the photograph without reaching for it. The woman on the porch had Lydia Thatcher's jawline. Lydia's way of standing with her weight on one hip, as if the world were slightly tilted and she was the only one who noticed.
Where had Howard Pomeroy gotten this? He had been Larkspur's unofficial historian for nearly fifty years. He remembered everything this town tried to forget. Had Lydia tried to forget them? Or had she, too, been something the town buried?
"We go," Callie said. "Tomorrow. We drive to Springfield and we find her."
"We can't," Eleanor said.
"Why?"
"Because Ruth Anne's deadline—"
"Forget Ruth Anne! Forget the deadline! Eleanor, Mom might be *alive*."
"She is alive." The words left Eleanor's mouth before she could stop them — hard, flat, final. The room went cold.
Margot's hand dropped from her lips. Callie's journal-bearing arm went still.
"What did you say?" Margot's voice was barely audible.
Eleanor closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet — the first time either of her sisters had seen her eyes anything but dry and calculating in years.
"Grandmother made me promise," she said. Each word sounded like it was being extracted. "On her deathbed. The night she passed. She held my hand and she made me promise not to look for Lydia."
The lamp hummed. Somewhere in the walls, an old pipe settled.
"She said — " Eleanor's voice cracked, and she pressed her fingers to her mouth the way Margot had done moments before, the gesture revealing, for one terrible instant, how alike they were. "She said, 'She built a life that doesn't have room for ghosts.'"
Callie's expression didn't change. That was the worst part — the stillness of it, the way her large brown eyes absorbed the words without blinking, as if she were photographing them with her body.
"You knew," Callie said finally. Not a question. "You've known this whole time that she was alive, and you — you let us think—"
"I let you grieve. There's a difference."
"There isn't." Callie's voice was still soft, but something underneath it had shifted, like a foundation settling past the point of repair. "There isn't a difference, Eleanor. You didn't protect us. You chose the dead over the living. You chose *Grandmother* over—"
"I chose to honor a dying woman's last request." Eleanor's voice was sharp now, the brittleness that always concealed the breaking. "Do you understand what that cost me? Do you understand what it—"
"What it cost *you*?" Margot stepped forward. "You were twenty-one. You were twenty-one years old and Grandma handed you a *secret* and you just — you carried it? For twenty years? You let Callie grow up thinking Mom was dead. You let me think she was dead because it was easier than—"
"Easier?" Eleanor's laugh was awful. "You think this was *easy*? Holding this house together? Holding everything together while you were in Chicago drinking your way through—"
She stopped. The silence that followed was a different kind of architectural — the kind that precedes collapse.
Margot went very still. Her gray-green eyes — the same as Eleanor's, the family inheritance neither of them could escape — went flat.
"Don't," Margot said quietly.
"I didn't mean—"
"Don't."
Callie stepped between them. "This isn't helping. None of this is helping. We have a photograph. We have an address. We can be in Springfield in three hours, and instead we're standing in a room with a dead man's file—"
"His name was Howard Pomeroy," Eleanor said, "and he deserves a dignified service tomorrow, which *someone* has to ensure happens because *someone* has to—"
"And *someone* has to keep the lights on," Margot snapped, her composure cracking back into place like a mask refastened. "Ruth Anne's deadline is in nine days. Nine days, Eleanor. I've been making calls — the bank won't extend the line of credit without new collateral, and if I can leverage the development deal to buy time—"
"You can't trust Ruth Anne."
"I don't have to trust her. I have to *outmaneuver* her. That's what I do. That's the one thing I'm actually good at, even if neither of you believes—"
"We believe in you," Callie said, reaching for Margot's arm.
Margot pulled away. "Don't. Don't do the peacemaker thing right now, Callie. Don't try to smooth this over with your journal and your metaphors. We are past metaphors."
The three sisters stood in the preparation room of the Thatcher Family Funeral Home — the house that had held their family for three generations, that had held the bodies of their grandfather, their grandmother, the memory of their mother like a phantom limb — and for the first time, none of them spoke.
The Casablanca lilies on the side table released their last breath of perfume, sweet and fading.
Eleanor picked up the Pomeroy file. "The graveside is at ten. I need to iron the drape and confirm the honor guard." She moved toward the door. "We'll discuss Springfield after the service."
"There won't be an *after,*" Callie said. "Don't you see that? There's never an after with you. There's always another task, another protocol, another reason to keep the door locked. You've been keeping that journal locked in a closet like it could burn the house down—"
"Maybe it can."
"And maybe it *should*."
Eleanor paused in the doorway. Her back was to them — the severe line of her bun, the sharp angles of her shoulders beneath the blazer with its damp patch she still hadn't changed.
"She didn't want to be found," Eleanor said. "She *chose* to leave. And I have honored that choice for twenty years because Grandmother believed — and I believed her — that some doors stay closed for a reason."
"People aren't doors, Eleanor." Callie's voice broke on the word. "She's our *mother*."
Eleanor said nothing. She walked down the hallway toward the viewing room, her heels clicking against the old wood floor, each step measured and precise, the sound of a woman holding herself together by force of will alone.
Margot watched her go. Then she pulled out her phone.
"What are you doing?" Callie asked.
"Calling Ruth Anne."
"Margot—"
"We need time. If Eleanor won't let us go to Springfield, I'll make a deal. Privately. I know how to talk to women like Ruth Anne Covington — I've been working for women like Ruth Anne Covington my entire career."
"That's exactly why you *shouldn't*—"
"Then come with me."
Callie stared at her sister. Margot's eyes were bright, reckless, the look she got right before she did something she couldn't take back.
"Callie." Margot's voice dropped, and for a moment, the armor fell away entirely. "I know you think I'm the disappointment. I know you think I'm the one who ruins things. But I can do this. Let me do this one thing right."
Callie opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
Before she could speak, the sound of tires on gravel cut through the silence.
All three sisters turned — Eleanor, halfway to the viewing room; Margot, phone in hand; Callie, journal and photograph clutched to her chest — as headlights swept across the front windows of the funeral home, painting them with light.
A sedan — silver, clean, with Illinois plates — rolled to a stop in the gravel parking lot. The engine died. The headlights went dark.
For a long moment, nothing moved.
Then the driver's door opened, and a woman stepped out.
She was in her sixties. Small-boned, with dark hair streaked silver and cut short against her jaw. She wore a simple coat — navy, unremarkable — and stood in the gravel lot with her hands at her sides, staring up at the Thatcher Family Funeral Home with an expression that made Callie's breath stop in her chest.
It was the expression of someone standing at the door of a house they had burned down themselves.
Recognition. Grief. And underneath it, like a root system buried deep, something that might have been longing.
The woman raised one hand — not waving, not shielding her eyes from a sun that had already set — just raising it, slowly, as if reaching for something that existed only in memory.
Callie's photograph slipped from her fingers and drifted to the floor.
"Oh my God." Her voice was barely a sound. "That's her."