Part 3
She had approved the hallway during a February tour. In winter it had seemed dignified, almost severe. Today the summer light made it intimate. She had imagined standing there with Daniel after the ceremony while the photographer adjusted her veil.
Instead she stood listening to her own breathing.
She opened the locket again.
The old photographs had not improved.
On the left, the pearl fragment remained unmistakable. Evelyn had owned three pairs of pearl earrings, but only one pair hung from long silver hooks. Claire had worn them to her college graduation. Afterward, her mother placed them back in a velvet box and said they were too easy to lose.
Claire now wore earrings made from those same pearls.
Her fingers rose to the drop at her left ear.
The shape in the locket was slightly smaller, perhaps because the photograph had been taken years before. That proved nothing. Families repeated jewelry. People bought similar things. A pearl was not a fingerprint.
The dent was.
The crescent scratch was.
The stiff hinge that resisted halfway and then released was.
Claire turned the locket over and pressed her thumbnail against the dent. The metal fit the memory too well.
The week after Evelyn’s funeral, Claire had searched the house. She had looked in the bathroom drawers, the jewelry cabinet, the locked box beneath her mother’s bed. Her aunt Ruth had helped for two days, then told her grief was making her obsessive.
Some things go missing because the person who owned them is gone, Ruth had said. You can turn the whole house upside down and still not get either one back.
Claire had accepted that because she was twenty-two and exhausted.
She had never asked who had packed Evelyn’s hospital belongings.
A door opened at the far end of the hall.
Claire closed the locket.
Her father stepped out of the men’s lounge with his phone in one hand. Richard Mercer was sixty-three, broad-shouldered, gray at the temples, and uncomfortable in any suit he had not chosen himself. He had resisted the charcoal tuxedo Claire selected until Daniel told him it looked good. Then he had accepted it without complaint, which Claire pretended not to find irritating.
“There you are,” he said. “Ruth says there’s some problem with the flowers.”
“Where is she?”
“In the ballroom.”
“Keep her there.”
Richard’s eyes narrowed.
“What happened?”
“Nothing I can explain yet.”
He studied her face. “You’ve been crying.”
“I haven’t.”
“You’re about to.”
Claire looked toward the windows.
The garden outside was bright and orderly. White chairs curved around a stone fountain where the outdoor photographs were supposed to happen at five. A waiter crossed the lawn carrying a tray of empty glasses, moving quickly but not running.
Richard put his phone away.
“Is Daniel all right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t know.”
His attention moved to the object in her hand.
“What’s that?”
Claire opened her fingers.
For two seconds, her father did not react. Then the color beneath his summer tan drained unevenly, beginning around his mouth.
She had expected recognition.
She had not expected fear.
“Where did you get that?”
The question was too close to her own.
“A child was wearing it.”
Richard stared at the locket.
“Which child?”
“The flower girl.”
“Whose child is she?”
“Her name is Lily Hart.”
He lifted his eyes sharply.
Claire felt the hallway become smaller.
“You know that name.”
“No.”
“You reacted.”
“I reacted to the locket.”
“You asked whose child she was.”
“Because a child had your mother’s property.”
“My mother’s property disappeared from our house.”
Richard’s jaw tightened. He glanced toward the ballroom doors.
“Not here.”
“There’s no one here.”
“There are two hundred people behind that door.”
“They can’t hear us.”
“That has never stopped people from learning things.”
Claire looked at him more carefully. His right hand had closed around his left cuff. He did that when trying not to interrupt someone. She had watched him ruin three shirts by twisting the cuff buttons while sitting beside Evelyn’s hospital bed.
“Who is Nora Hart?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lily’s mother.”
“That doesn’t make me know her.”
“But you know the name.”
“I said I didn’t.”
Claire opened the locket.
Richard looked away before the interior was fully visible.
That frightened her more than his first reaction.
“What’s inside?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You won’t look.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why?”
His voice lowered. “Because your mother is dead, Claire. Because you’re standing in a wedding dress five minutes after you were supposed to walk down the aisle, holding something that made you unhappy for years. I don’t need to inspect it to understand this isn’t good.”
She stepped closer.
“You told me it was probably thrown away.”
“I said it might have been.”
“You said the hospital lost it.”
“They lost other things.”
“She didn’t wear this to the hospital.”
Richard pressed his lips together.
Claire heard the answer in the silence before he gave it.
“No,” he said.
“Then how could the hospital lose it?”
He rubbed the cuff button.
“I don’t remember every conversation we had after she died.”
“I do.”
“Then you remember I wasn’t well.”
“You were grieving.”
“So were you.”
“That doesn’t make the locket disappear.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
His surrender came so quietly that Claire nearly missed it.
The ballroom doors opened a few inches. Ruth Mercer slipped through and closed them quickly behind her.
She was Richard’s older sister by four years and had dressed for the wedding in deep blue silk, a color she wore whenever she expected photographs. Her silver-blond hair curved neatly at her jaw. She carried Claire’s small emergency bag over one wrist.
“I knew something was wrong,” Ruth said. “The musicians are repeating themselves.”
Richard turned toward her.
“Go back inside.”
Ruth ignored him.
Her gaze found the locket in Claire’s palm.
May you like
The emergency bag slipped from her wrist and struck the floor.
A packet of tissues, two safety pins, and a pale pink lipstick rolled onto the marble.
