Page 92 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

“Well, to my knowledge, Rachel never got sick. She had a cast-iron stomach.”

They sat for a moment. “Anything else?” Alex asked.

Veronica hesitated then asked, “Do you know if she fell in love with someone?”

He shrugged in a lazy way. “Maybe. That would account for her ghosting me. I think she wanted to try to stay in India, but it fell through.”

“Really.” That was new information.

“Yeah, but it was a challenge, you know. Where to live, what to do for work. She didn’t really have the chops.”

Veronica imagined a young Rachel wheeling and dealing to try to extend her visa. Was there more in the rest of the letters? But there couldn’t be many more if the last one was a few weeks before she left. What had happened in those last days?

Maybe Jill knew what happened with Zoish.

“Well,” she said, standing, “thanks for your time. If you give me an email address, I can send you a copy of Rachel’s book list.”

“Ah,” he said, waving a curmudgeonly hand. “I don’t do email. I don’t even have a computer.”

Veronica smiled. “Here, then.” She ripped out the piece of paper from her notebook. “This is her name and her most well-known book.”

He accepted it. “I might have to go find an internet café or something.”

“Or,” Henry said, “find it on your phone.” He pointed to a late-model Apple phone on the table.

Alex nodded. “Cool.”

Back at theriad, Veronica checked on Mariah and found her deeply asleep. In the courtyard, Henry settled with a blanket on the settee and a tray of tea he’d had sent up when they arrived. She wrapped herself in ablanket and sat nearby, her shoes discarded, her knees tucked under her. The evening was overcast, quiet, but the lamps were lit, throwing their magical stars, and the fountain trickled, and far away was the sound of someone shouting happily. She accepted a glass of tea and settled back.

“It doesn’t feel like Christmas Eve at all,” she said.

“No.” He stretched out, his big feet on the heavy table, his head back on the cushions. She admired his craggy profile, the rather too-large nose, his square chin. “I have to admit it’s been a long time since I celebrated in any kind of traditional way. I was always on the road.”

“Does your family have a lot of traditions?”

“I’m Italian, of course we have traditions—for everything. But yeah, a lot for Christmas, the seven fishes, midnight mass.” He pursed his lips. “Other things I’m sure I’ve forgotten. How about you?”

“I thought I’d be miserable missing my kids, and I’m not.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “I mean, I do miss them and all the things we would do leading up to the day, but mainly, Christmas week was about reading for me. They all love to ski, and I’m just not into it, so I stayed behind in the lodge and read.”

“That sounds all right.”

“Yeah, it was.”

“What was it like when you were a kid?”

She hadn’t thought about that in a long time. “First, it was tamales on Christmas Eve. Somebody’s grandma was always selling them by the dozen, so we’d pig out on tamales and Christmas cookies and string popcorn for the tree, make construction-paper stars with glitter.” She grew quiet, remembering. “I realized when I was older that we didn’t have any money, but it never felt like that, you know? I always had some toy I’d been wanting, and she’d make a turkey or a roast chicken, and we’d sing carols and all that stuff. All the things. It was just my mom and me then. My dad was never really around. She married my stepdad when I was ten, and we were more of a traditional kind of family after that.”

“Did you like him, your stepdad?”

“I loved him. He was a good guy. And it helped to have more money coming in.”

“That’s nice.”

Henry drained his tea and set the glass on the table. He looked at her for a long moment. Veronica looked back, and a soft cloud of yearning enveloped them. She thought of his kiss, his big hands. He took her glass, too, and set it aside, then moved gracefully, smooth as a cat, across the space separating them. “I don’t think Mariah is going to wake up, do you?”

“No,” she said quietly. Stars of yellow light danced over his craggy jaw, touched his eyebrow. He brushed hair from her forehead, followed the line around her ear, down her neck. Veronica flowed into her body, occupying her limbs entirely, and let their longings lead her. She raised her hands to his face, cheekbones under the pads of her palms, eyebrows at her fingertips, jaw at her wrists. His eyes shone with flecks of reflected light. She stroked the length of his nose, his full lower lip. “I haven’t had sex with anyone but my ex in about three decades,” she said quietly.

“Are you okay?”