Page 47 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

Mariah nodded. “All right.” She dug in her pocket for some pound notes.

“No,” Hortense said. She took Mariah’s hand. “I feel your pain, love, but you’ve got some work to do to shed the past.”

Mariah blew air between her lips. “Yeah, I didn’t need a psychic to tell me that.”

Tangled and overheated from the thwarted encounter, she tried not to cry as she called up the map on her phone. It was stupid to believe in all this crap, anyway, so why did she keep trying to get answers this way?

She tumbled right back to the dark place she’d been after the encounter at the café, and no matter how she slapped them away, tears kept sloshing from her eyes, annoying and embarrassing.

Get your shit together,she told herself sternly. She could just imagine the hoots and hilarity she’d get from the old boarding crowd if they knew she’d done that.Find your grit.

Shaking herself physically, she coughed and focused on the address where Henry and Veronica waited at a café. It had an old-world vibe, with Middle Eastern music on the speakers and tables crowded together in the room. It looked like it had been here forever, in the menus and the decor. A host showed them to a four-top by the window and brought them a carafe of water.

It wasn’t quite Indian and not quite Persian, but a mix of both. Mariah realized she was starving, and ordered hummus and olives for the table before the host left. “How was the grocery store?” she asked.

“Loved it,” Veronica said. “What did you get up to?”

She shrugged. “Just browsing.”

Henry said, “We found the address and it turned out to be an abandoned bookstore.”

The bookstore is the key.“What?” A shiver ran up the back of her neck. “What bookstore?”

“We don’t really know. Someone named Ms. Irani ran it and went back to India, so it closed.”

“That name sounds familiar.”

“It does not match the woman at the café,” Veronica said, “but when we get back to the hotel, I can run it through some Google searches and see if we get hits to anything else.” She’d been flicking through emails on her phone and scowled. Her cheeks went bright red.

“Everything okay?”

Veronica closed the app and stuck the phone in her back pocket. “Fine.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Things were definitely not fine in Veronica’s world. In her email was an urgent note that her bank account was overdrawn. A second notice said that her rent payment had been rejected. Under cover of the conversation between Henry and Mariah, Veronica tried to figure out what had happened. Everything was automated, and she didn’t use that account for anything except essentials. No way it could be overdrawn.

And now her hands went clammy as she remembered that her credit card had not worked in the grocery store. What the hell was going on?

It was still only 5:00 a.m. back in Denver, so she wouldn’t be able to reach the bank for several hours.

“Sure you’re okay?” Henry asked.

She waved it off. “Minor glitch, I think.” But her ears felt hot with a form of embarrassment she had not felt in decades, since she’d been a scholarship student at CU working three jobs and carrying instant coffee in her backpack to get by while all her friends had credit cards funded by their parents. She had been determined that no one would know.

She’d changed everything about herself when she moved from Taos to Boulder, Colorado, a change of climate, culture, and class she was determined to navigate properly. She observed the way the monied girls cut their hair and cut hers the same; she shopped ceaselessly at thriftstores for pieces that gave her a well-tended, if faintly shabby, look. She lied about her background, saying she was from Albuquerque—a city they still looked down on. Honestly, it was shocking how little any of them knew about New Mexico, a state directly south, not even a three-hour drive away. She said her mom had been a Realtor and her dad a car salesman, careers she thought she could fake knowledge about, positions that could make a solid middle-class living, but not like a dentist or a teacher, people who’d gone to college.

She also changed her name, from Brandi (with ani!) to Veronica, which sounded sleek and sophisticated, the name of the elegant girl in Archie comic books.

In those days, it had never occurred to her that her mom would have been devastated that Brandi/Veronica had lied about so much, that by changing her history, she was nullifying her mother and stepfather.

It wasn’t like she’d continued to lie over time. Spence and the kids knew about her life in Taos, but she didn’t talk about it a lot. She tried to avoid even thinking about New Mexico, the high desert, the red earth, the hardscrabble life they’d lived there.

But this bone-deep shame over being completely broke, without a single penny or a way to get it until Mariah paid her, was searingly familiar even after almost thirty years. She couldn’t bear it if Henry and Mariah suspected that she had nothing at all.

The good thing was that Mariah would keep paying her every Friday. That sum wouldn’t address the missing rent payment, but it would keep her afloat here.

The rest she’d have to figure out on the fly.