Abruptly, she looked at him.

“Why do I get the impression you’re leaving?” she asked grimly.

In the end, Gin returned to Easterly because there was nowhere else for her to go. Parking the Drophead in its berth in the garages, she walked over to the kitchen entrance and went in through the screen door.

As usual, everything was neat and in order, no pans in the sink, the dishwasher quietly running, the countertops gleaming. There was a lingering sweetness in the air, that old-fashioned soap Miss Aurora used.

Gin’s heart was beating as she proceeded to the door to the woman’s private quarters. Curling up a fist, she hesitated before knocking.

“Come on in, girl,” came the demand from the other side. “Don’t just stand there.”

Opening the way in, Gin hung her head because she didn’t want the tears in her eyes to show. “How did you know it was me?”

“Your perfume. And I’ve been waiting for you. Also saw the car come in.”

Miss Aurora’s living space was set up in exactly the same way it always had been, two big stuffed chairs set against long windows, shelves full of pictures of kids and grown-ups, a galley kitchen that was as spotless and orderly as the women’s big, professionally appointed one. Gin had never been in the bedroom and bath; nor would it ever have occured to her to ask to see them.

Eventually, Gin looked up. Miss Aurora was in the chair she always used, and she indicated the vacant one. “Sit.”

Gin went across and did as she was told. As she smoothed her skirt, she thought of doing so when she’d been in the reflecting garden with Samuel T.

“It’s called an annulment,” Miss Aurora said abruptly. “And you should do it immediately. I’m a Christian woman, but I will tell you plainly that you married a bad man. Then again, you act before you think, you are rebellious even when no one is doin’ you wrong, and your version of freedom is being out of control, it’s not about making choices.”

Gin had to laugh. “You know, you’re the second person who’s torn me apart tonight.”

“Well, that’s ’cuz the good Lord clearly thinks you need to hear the message twice.”

Gin thought about her whole out-of-control thing. Remembered her and Richard fighting in her room just the other night, and her going for that Imari lamp. “My mood’s been all over the place lately.”

“That’s because the sand’s shifting under your feet. You don’t know what you’re standing on, and that makes a body dizzy.”

Putting her face in her hands, she shook her head. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

During the trip back from the seminary, she had vacillated between that emotionally difficult, but clear-sighted, conversation with Samuel T. … and her urge to re-embrace the calculated mania of her old way of doing things.

“There is nothing that cannot be undone,” Miss Aurora said. “And your true family will not desert you, even if the money does.”

Gin thought of the great house they were in. “I failed at being a mother.”

“No, you didn’t try.”

“It’s too late.”

“If I’d said that when I came into this house and met the four of you, where would you all be?”

Gin remembered back to all those nights the five of them had eaten together in the kitchen. Even as a fleet of nannies had cycled through the household, mostly because they were tortured and way out-gunned, Miss Aurora had been the one person who could corral her and her brothers.

Searching the photographs on the shelves, Gin became teary again as she saw several of her—and she pointed to a picture of her in pigtails. “That was on the way to summer camp.”

“You were ten.”

“I hated the food.”

“I know. I had to feed you for a month after you got home—and you’d only been away for two weeks.”

“That one’s Amelia, isn’t it.”

Miss Aurora grunted as she turned in her chair. “Which one? The pink?”

“Yes.”

“She was seven and a half.”

“You were there for her, too.”

“Yes, I was. She’s the closest thing to a true granddaughter I have because you’re the closest thing to a daughter I have.”

Gin brushed under her eyes. “I’m glad she has you. She got kicked out of Hotchkiss, you know.”

“That’s what she told me.”

“I’m so glad she comes to talk to you—”

“You know I’m not going to be here forever, right?” As Gin looked over, Miss Aurora’s dark eyes were steady. “When I’m gone, you need to pick up the slack with her. No one else will, and she’s got one foot in childhood, one in adulthood. It’s a precarious time. You step up, Virginia Elizabeth, or I swear I will haunt you. Do you hear me, girl? I will come back as your conscience and I will not let you rest.”

For the first time, Gin properly focused on Miss Aurora. Under her housecoat, she was thinner than she had ever been, her face drawn with bags under her eyes.

“You can’t die,” Gin heard herself say. “You just can’t.”

Miss Aurora laughed. “That’s up to God. Not you or me.”

FORTY-THREE

Lane was not leaving the business center until the detectives were finished. As a result, therefore, he found himself walking in and out of the offices, killing time until eventually, he found himself opening the way into his father’s space and taking a seat in the chair his dear old dad had always sat in.

And that was when he had an aha! moment.

Pushing himself around on the leather throne, he shook his head and wondered why it hadn’t dawned on him sooner.

There were shelves behind the desk, shelves that were filled with your standard-issue, leather-bound volumes and framed diplomas and manly effects of a life lived to impress other people with money: sailing trophies, horse pictures, bourbon bottles that were unusual or special. But none of that was what interested him.

No, what he had suddenly noticed and cared about were the built-in, hand-tooled, wood-faced cabinets that were underneath the ego display.

Leaning down, he tried a couple, but they were all locked—and yet there didn’t seem to be any obvious places to put keys or enter codes—