She answered in a cold, exhausted voice.
“You don’t know Thomas the way I do.”
Then she hung up.
Now, as rain dripped steadily from Susan’s umbrella, a man in a charcoal coat approached us.
“I’m Mr. Elwood, Thomas’s attorney,” he said gently. “He made me promise that if anything happened to him, I was to ask all five of you to come to my office after the service. He left something for each of you.”
Susan’s grip tightened around the umbrella handle.
Mara frowned. “What did he leave?”
The lawyer looked at all of us before answering.w
“A box.”
Mr. Elwood’s office smelled like coffee, old paper, and the kind of order kept by men who alphabetize grief.
A small locked wooden box sat in the center of his desk.
He handed me a key.
“Thomas instructed me to let you open it.”
The click of the lock sounded far too loud in the quiet room.
Inside were five envelopes—one for each of us—addressed in Thomas’s shaky handwriting.
We scattered instinctively to different corners of the office, as though privacy still mattered in the middle of heartbreak.
I opened mine carefully.
“My sweet girl,” it began. “Susan left because she discovered something about me the rest of you never knew.”
My breath caught painfully in my throat. My vision blurred so quickly I had to wipe my eyes and begin again.
Across the room, Noah began crying quietly. Mara pressed both hands over her mouth. Michael blinked rapidly, staring down at his letter.
Susan went completely white.
Without saying a word, she folded her letter, shoved it into her coat pocket, and walked out of the office.
“Susan!” I called.
But she kept walking.
I ran after her and found her beneath a large oak tree across the street, bent over with sobs so violent they looked painful.
I wrapped my arms around her tightly.
“I made a terrible mistake, Christie,” she gasped.
The others caught up a moment later, forming a silent circle around us.
Susan pulled Thomas’s letter from her pocket with shaking hands and pushed it toward me.
“You read it,” she whispered. “I can’t do it again.”
So I did.
For illustrative purposes only
Thomas explained that the woman in the locket was his younger sister, Elise.
She had run away at seventeen and later reached out to him for help. By the time Thomas found her, Elise had already died from illness, leaving Noah and Susan trapped in foster care.
