Page 38 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

The first girl, wearing a miniskirt and dark tights, kept her fingers lightly on Veronica’s arm. “Sure?”

Veronica nodded. “Thank you for your kindness.”

They waved and let her be. Veronica picked up the umbrella, but it was wet on the inside now, and she’d broken one of the stretchers. She shook it out as well as she could and folded it, tucking it under her arm, then limped toward home.

Everything stung. Her tailbone, the jarring impact to her head, her elbow, which really hurt quite a lot. Tears welled up in her eyes, and her hair, wet from the rain, started to drip onto her shirt.

What the hell was she doing? Why was she even in England, when she could be at home with her kids? Even if they were doing something on Christmas that didn’t include her, she could have come up with a celebration of some kind, to maybe start making new memories or start to heal the family wounds. Something.

Instead, she’d deserted all of them.

This was such a bad idea. She thought of her kids, swarming into the apartment to talk her out of the trip. Why hadn’t she listened?

She was too old to start over, start a new life. She wanted the old one back. Her beautiful home and flowers, the reliable cadence of the year, holidays and birthdays and family traditions. The granite solidity of Spence’s family, which had been such a lure. They took family seriously, with traditions and a culture all their own, and seemingly eternal, bits and pieces dating back to great-grandparents who’d escaped the stuffy society of the east to build a new life in Colorado. Where they’d promptly re-created their family legacies in a Western font.

She had loved that family grounding so much. It felt like magic, like a net that could hold you no matter what.

Now all of it was gone. Running away to Europe with a highly unstable young woman, and trying to resurrect her old thesis wasn’t going to get it back.

The recognition pierced her. Under cover of the rain, she let tears flow, holding her arm close to her body so she didn’t have to move her elbow.

Two blocks on, she realized she was passing the welcoming windows of a bookstore. She didn’t even think about it—she was inside before she knew it, greeted by the heady scent of coffee, and books, and the low murmur of voices layered with classical music. Everything in her body let go.

She dropped the umbrella in a stand by the door and wandered in, just looking curiously until she got the hang of it, then climbed a set of stairs and wandered that level, too, then headed back down to history and local history, which of course showcased titles from the Bloomsbury group. Despite her study of Elsie, she hadn’t read much by the rest of the group, so she browsed several books—poetry and criticism and novels and gardening. She picked up a slender copy of Virginia Woolf’sA Room of One’s Own, which she probably should already have read, but hadn’t, and a travel book by Vita Sackville-West,Passenger to Tehran, which seemed appropriate.

Her body settled as she wandered. Her breath slowed, her joints loosened.

In the coffee shop, she bought a flat white and took it to a table by the window, where she leafed throughCountry Living, pages and pages and pages of genteel rustic beauty—gardens and farmhouse tables set with linens and old plates and fat candles. Such a relief!

Magazines had been a lifeline for her as a teen. In those pages, she spied a different kind of life, one with healthy food and kindly light and flowers snipped from the garden. Of course she’d fallen hard for Spence’s family home! Drinking her coffee, she thought about the home she’d created there, the garden beds she’d planted. They’d been worthy renditions, and she could take some pride in that. She considered Elsie, who’d been forced to leave a home she loved in India, then another she loved in England, and finally was forced into a role she didn’t want in a country that never felt like home.

But she’d made the best of it. Only a handful of her paintings survived, but they were widely acknowledged to be masterful. She’d done her best with what she had.

Veronica sat back in her seat, sipping milky coffee as she watched people hurry by in the rain. The life she had loved so much was gone. Really and truly gone. She would never have it back.

So what now? She didn’t have some wild artistic talent to pour her loss into. She might be able to write the thesis, finally, but was that what she really wanted?

She had no idea. What in the world was she going to do with the next thirty or forty years?

A sense of someone nearby made her look up, thinking she would have to share the table. She pulled her bag closer to her side, and looked up with a distracted smile, remembering that maybe Americans smiled too much and she should do that less.

Except that she was American, and maybe that was okay.

It was Henry. Surprised and more pleased than she would have admitted, she offered a genuine smile. “Hello!”

“May I join you?” Henry said in his distinctive voice. “Or is this a rare moment of peace?”

Milky light spilled over his lean form, the worn-thin chambray shirt with its rolled sleeves showing tanned arms, his craggy face with wide mouth and aggressive nose. He carried a worn leather jacket over one arm. It crossed her mind that she found him attractive, that the scent of him rustled her skin.

“Please,” she said, gesturing toward the open chair.

He carried a solid stack of books he settled on the table. “What did you find?” he asked, pointing to the books at her elbow.

She showed him. “I’ve been walking around the neighborhood of some of the Bloomsbury set, and I realized that I’d never readA Room of One’s Own.”

“I haven’t, either. You’ll have to let me know how it is.”

“I will. What did you get?”