Page 112 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

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Ugh. A snap of irritation crossed her sinuses, the back of her neck. Restlessly, she moved her shoulders. “Whatever. She wants you to read the letter first.”

“Okay.”

Henry lowered his book. “Are you sure you want to know all this, kid? Maybe sometimes it’s better to let things go.”

“You’ve already said that.” She wiggled her leg. “I didn’t come all this way to just drop it. It couldn’t be anything that bad, because she was living a perfectly normal life.” Beyond the window, the city shimmered, lights upon lights upon lights. So many people in one city. More people in this one city than lived in the whole of some US states. “And I know it’s not some mystery about my bio dad, because I wasn’t born until two years later and I already ran those DNA tests.”

Yonaguni Monument: Natural Formation or Sunken City Beneath Japan?

Doggerland: The Drowned World Beneath the North Sea

The Channel Tunnel: How Engineers Joined Britain and France Under the Sea

Øresund Bridge–Tunnel: How the Engineering Marvel Between Denmark and Sweden Dives Beneath the Sea

Henry raised his eyebrows. “Did your mom know you did that?”

“Yeah, I told her. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t have some weird genetic disease or something, but he’s an ordinary white guy in California she had a one-night stand with on vacation.”

Veronica gave her a quizzical look. “Does it bother you, that you don’t know him?”

“No,” she said, shrugging, and meant it. She nudged Henry’s shin. “This guy is the only person who ever felt like a father type.”

“Thanks, kid,” he said. “Ditto.”

“Anyway,” Mariah continued, “I think my mom wanted me to get to the bottom of this. It’s a big story in her life, right?”

“Yes,” Veronica said. “So how do you want me to handle the letter? You want to read it, or not?”

Suddenly, Mariah felt afraid, and she leaned back, curled into the corner. “I don’t know.” She reached into her pocket for an Ativan and popped it with a drink of water. “Who has the snacks?”

Veronica passed the bag over. “You are a bottomless pit.”

“Boredom eating,” she said, and pulled her earphones up over her ears, then tuned the world out with a playlist, watching the lights that never ended, until they suddenly did. She nibbled salty snacks and let the music carry her away until the Ativan did its job and knocked her out.

Chapter Fifty-One

Veronica asked if she could sit by the window, and Henry traded with her. After tucking his backpack behind him, he pulled his coat over his shoulder and was asleep in minutes. Nice trick.

Mariah, too, was deeply, slobberingly asleep, stretched out in the seat, her head on a sweater. The whole car seemed to be snoring lightly, various notes coming from different corners, robust, deep snores and slight ladylike whistles, a punctuation here and there from someone who probably thought they didn’t snore at all. The vulnerable humanity of the chorus touched her. Next to her, Henry joined in, a very quiet rumble.

A three-quarter moon moved with them, lighting small villages and fields and the odd river or lake. It was lonely to be awake, to be on this train, to be worrying about her family back home, but it was also weirdly touching to be on this train with so many others, in the middle of the night in a country far, far away.

As soon as they’d left the beach, her phone started buzzing with texts from Jenna, who dramatically detailed the horrors of the family ski trip. Fiona and Spence’s mother, a patrician pillar of the Boulder inner circle, had engaged in a serious fight. Veronica found herself thinking more kindly of Fiona, pregnant and far from her Irish family, stuck witha WASPy crew in the mountains. She’d probably wondered what the hell she’d gotten herself into.

Veronica read all of it, fiercely glad she was far away, and responded mildly.It will blow over. You know your grandmother likes things to be civil. It’s hard to imagine her in a fight.