Chapter 24: Lenora
I found my mother's things in the attic on a wet Thursday, in a trunk that smelled of cedar and rosewater.
I hadn't meant to look. I'd gone up for a lantern. But the trunk was in the corner beneath the eaves, and its lid was slightly open, and I could not walk away.
Inside were the small remains of a life. A blue shawl. A pair of reading glasses with one cracked lens. A hairbrush with strands of pale brown hair still caught in the bristles. A little embroidered bag containing three buttons and a folded recipe for plum cake, written in a looping, slanted hand.
I sat on the floor with the shawl in my lap and breathed it in. It still smelled of her, faintly, of lavender and wool. I remembered her hands. That was all. Not her face, which had blurred years ago, but her ha
