Page 82 of Key West Homecoming

“Rachel, I have a letter from my grandmother. There’s a safe deposit box at Ocean National Bank on Brickell Avenue in Miami, and the original will is inside. Edmund is named on the box, and so am I. Can we drive up in the morning?”

“Are you certain the original is there?”

“Gloria says it is in the letter. Edmund confirmed it yesterday.”

“All right. Six o’clock. I’ll bring coffee. Tell Edmund we’ll pick him up at his daughter’s place at six-fifteen.”

Emma smiled.

“Thank you.”

“Emma?”

“Yes?”

“Get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

“I will.”

She ended the call and texted Edmund with the plan. Then Emma sat back with the envelope in her lap and watched the last of the daylight turn blue over the palms.

She thought about her father as a seven-year-old boy with a jackknife. Memories of her mother holding her hand through all the years that came after his death flooded her thoughts. And her grandmother, always sitting at a kitchen table writing a letter she hoped Emma would someday read in her chair.

For most of her life, Emma had thought of legacy as something people left behind when they were gone. Tonight, she understood it differently.

Sometimes what they left behind was a place to come home to. Only a few initials beneath a porch railing, a letter from her grandmother and Emma knew that she had been loved every single day of her life.

CHAPTER 14

Rachel picked Emma up at six sharp with two large coffees and a paper bag of croissants from a bakery Emma hadn’t known existed. Emma had slept badly, but the coffee helped, and by the time they pulled up in front of Rebecca’s house at six-fifteen, she felt awake enough to face the drive to Miami.

Edmund was waiting on the porch. Rebecca stood beside him in a robe, holding a glass of water in one hand.

“Drink it,” she told him.

“I’m going to be sitting in a car for three hours.”

“That changes nothing.”

Edmund looked at Emma as if hoping for support.

“She’s the sugar police too,” Emma said. “I wouldn’t argue with her.”

Rebecca smiled. “Thank you.”

Edmund finished the water and handed her the glass.

“How did you sleep?” Rachel asked Emma once they were on the road.

“Not well. You?”

“Never before something important. I made peace with it fifteen years ago.”

Edmund was quiet in the back seat for the first hour. Somewhere north of Marathon, he told them the last time he’d made the drive had been with Gloria three years earlier. On the way home, she had wanted to stop at a Cuban place in Islamorada for coffee, and Edmund still remembered exactly what she’d ordered.

They stopped there on the way up instead.

The woman behind the counter recognized Edmund as soon as he walked in. She came around the counter and hugged him carefully, then said something in Spanish that Emma didn’t understand. Edmund answered her quietly. The woman touched his arm and nodded before going back behind the counter.