Thirty-Three
Wren
“So where do you want them?” Tate hoists a large file box into the back room, interrupting my lunch. His voice is casual, but there’s a coolness in his tone that pulls my attention away from my sandwich.
Lili bursts in a beat later, slightly out of breath, her cheeks flushed. She must have run after him.
“Is that—?” Her eyes widen, darting between the box and Tate’s face, a hint of hope lighting up her expression.
“Box one of twelve,” he answers, then shifts his focus back to me. “And I’m gonna drop it here if you don’t tell me where to put it.”
“On the table,” Lili and I say in unison. Our eyes meet for a fleeting moment, a spark of connection amid the ever-present tension between us now.
Tate groans, not from the weight of the box, before trudging over to the table and lowering it with a thud. He starts walking back to the door, then stops and eyes both of us. “A little help?”
We hurry out after him.
The boxes make a daunting stack once we have them alltogether on the table. I expect to see Lili smiling, but she’s just staring at them and twisting one hand in the other.
“This is going to take a long time to go through.” She looks at the clock on the wall and twists her hands tighter. “I only have fifteen minutes left on my lunch break before I’m supposed to be back in the gift shop.”
Tate glances between the two of us and eventually mumbles that he’ll cover the gift shop this afternoon.
“Thanks,” Lili says quietly. She doesn’t sound like she means it.
“But you owe me, Tourist Girl.” Tate gives her a mock solute as he backs out the door. “And you two kids better not play too nice.”
My jaw clenches at his parting barb, while Lili turns away to hide her flush.
I know Eryn is talking to him again, or at least she’s gone back to making him lunch, based on the Petticoat Café bag he had earlier, but beyond the occasional word or two, he and I haven’t spoken.
I want to tell Lili not to let him get to her, but she’s already moving toward the boxes, her shoulders tense.
“Okay to start with the one on top?” she asks, her voice slightly strained.
“As opposed to the one on the bottom?”
“Yes, as opposed to the one on the bottom.” There’s a ghost of a smile in her voice, even if her face doesn’t show it. She lifts the lid off the box and looks inside.
The hours pass, filled with the rustle of paper, the scrape of cardboard, and the occasional grumble of disappointment before we both push back from the table, the final box emptied.
Lili had the idea to sort things into piles, the largest by far comprised of less-obvious fakes, followed closely by weird cat stuff that got inadvertently packed and needs to be returned to Mrs. Mayhew. There are some interesting items in the historically significant pile, but far fewer in the Nantucket specific pile. And nothing beyond the letters and the map, which I spent the last few days authenticating while Lili transcribed a copy, that connects to Kezia Gardner.
“I don’t understand.” Lili picks up a porcelain statue of a cat in fisherman’s garb, her brow furrowed. “Where are the other letters?”
“Maybe he only wrote one.” I shrug, the tedium of the last several hours with almost nothing to show for it making my response clipped. “Maybe she destroyed the others, or time did that for her.”
Her sharp glance changes my tone.
“Or maybe we just haven’t found them yet,” I offer. “The Mayhews aren’t the only people on this island with boxes in their attics. Maybe they’re just hiding in someone else’s.”
But her expression falls further, and she sinks into a chair, staring at the piles as if they hold answers we can’t see. “Since when are you the optimistic one?”
I almost saySince I met you, but instead I settle on, “Someone has to be.”
There’s silence after that while I continue searching for Mr. Mayhew’s personal ledger that will hopefully establish provenance for some of these items.
“Wren.” Her voice is quiet, almost a whisper.
