“Yes?”
“Did Mommy send Claire?”
The question slipped into the car like a secret.
I looked at him in the mirror. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged, embarrassed. “Claire knows things.”
“What things?”
“The star song. The blue scarf. The way Mommy used to make toast soldiers with soft eggs.”
Owen added sleepily, “And the garden story.”
My fingers tightened on the steering wheel.
“What garden story?”
“About the white roses,” Lucas said. “Mommy said white roses were for new beginnings.”
I pulled into the estate driveway moments later, but instead of going straight to the house, I stopped near the garden.
Evelyn’s garden had been neglected after her death. Not ruined—nothing at Whitmore House was ever allowed to look ruined—but simplified. Landscapers kept it neat. The roses were trimmed. The paths were swept. Yet its soul had faded.
Three weeks ago, I noticed fresh white roses near the east wall.
I assumed the gardeners had replaced a dead bed.
Now I wondered.
The boys had fallen asleep by the time I carried them upstairs. Lucas mumbled Claire’s name once. Owen clutched my collar and whispered the first line of the star song.
I stood in their doorway longer than I usually did.
Their room was warmer than I remembered. Drawings on the dresser. Dinosaurs under the bed. Two paper stars taped crookedly beside the window. On the nightstand between their beds sat a small framed photograph of Evelyn that I had not placed there.
Claire must have.
Evelyn was laughing in the picture, her hair blown across her cheek, one hand resting over her heart. I remembered taking it at Lake Geneva before the boys were born, before diagnosis, before hospitals, before I learned that fear could live permanently beneath the ribs.
I sat on the edge of Owen’s bed and finally sang.
The star song came out broken at first. My voice stumbled over words I had avoided for years. But Lucas’s breathing softened. Owen relaxed against his pillow. And somewhere between the second verse and the last, grief stopped being a locked room and became a door I could open without disappearing inside.
Downstairs, Ruth waited in the kitchen with tea untouched in front of her.
“There is something else,” she said before I could speak.
I was beginning to dread those words.
“What?”
Ruth stood and opened the small drawer beneath the household message board. She removed a folded sheet of paper.
“I found this in Claire’s apron yesterday. I thought it was a grocery list. Then I saw Mrs. Whitmore’s name.”