Page 76 of Key West Homecoming

“Thank you for having me.”

Rebecca glanced at the envelope.

“You’re going to the cottage?”

“Right now.”

“Good.”

Emma stepped onto the porch, then turned back.

“Rebecca?”

“Yes?”

“Tell him the shortbread on the smaller plate was the right choice.”

Rebecca laughed, and for one brief second Emma heard something in it that reminded her of the way Edmund had described Gloria.

“I’ll tell him.”

“I’d like to come back sometime.”

“We’d like that too.”

Emma walked down the path with Gloria’s letter held carefully in one hand.

When she reached the rental car, she opened the passenger door and placed the envelope on the seat instead of tossing it into her bag. She stood there with one hand on the roof of the car as her eyes filled again.

She had come to Rebecca’s house expecting a letter. She was leaving with the original will waiting in a safe deposit box, ten years of Arthur’s lies to unravel and a fuller picture of the life Gloria had lived after Emma grew up and moved away.

But none of that was what Emma was thinking about as she got behind the wheel.

Her grandmother had written to her.

Emma started the car and looked once at the envelope on the passenger seat before pulling away from the curb and driving toward Hibiscus Lane.

CHAPTER 13

The envelope rode on the passenger seat with Gloria’s handwriting turned up where Emma could see it. Eight minutes of road lay between Simonton Street and Hibiscus Lane. She took fifteen and couldn’t have said afterward what she’d done with the other seven.

At a red light on Truman, she picked up the envelope and got as far as putting her thumb beneath the flap before the light changed. She set it down again.

Edmund had carried the letter for nearly a year. Emma could wait a few more minutes.

The cottage came into view around the last curve of the lane, pink and low behind the fence with bougainvillea spilling over the porch railing. Gloria’s lilies followed the fence in white, pink and yellow, and Jake’s truck was in the driveway.

Emma parked and picked up the envelope.

Jake was on the porch with a hose in one hand, watering the herb pots along the railing. He straightened when he saw her, and the smile that started on his face disappeared when he got a better look at hers.

“Hey.”

He watched her come up the path. “You okay?”

Emma held up the envelope.

“Edmund gave me a letter from my grandmother.”