There was a signature at the bottom. Evangeline Broussard. The name wasn’t familiar, but it was clear that the woman—whoever she was—knew more about Althea’s last days than she did. She hadn’t even known her grandmother was sick.
Lizzy swallowed past the bite of tears, the mingled tastes of guilt and grief salty on her tongue as she reached for the parcel that had accompanied the letter. It was wrapped in brown paper, and somewhat worse for wear. She stared at the words stamped across the package in red ink: RETURN TO SENDER. Apparently it had been mailed to her old apartment, returned by the new tenants, and then re-sent to her office.
She’d meant to send Althea one of those change of address cards, but like so much of late, it had fallen through the cracks. She held her breath as she tore away the wrapping, then exhaled sharply when she caught a glimpse of heavily tooled black leather. She knew the book well. It was the journal Althea had given her on her sixteenth birthday—the journal all Moon girls received on their sixteenth birthday.
Her fingers quivered as she ran them over the cover, the ribbed spine, the pages with their coarse deckle edges, knowing the feel of them by heart. There were eight more just like it back in Salem Creek, locked away in a bookcase in her grandmother’s reading room, each named for the author who had penned it. The Book of Sabine. The Book of Dorothée. The Book of Aurore. On down through the generations. Presumably, the ninth—The Book of Althea—had now taken its place among them.
They were a tradition in the Moon family, a rite of passage as each member committed to the Path. Painstakingly penned volumes of remedies and recipes, sacred blessings and scraps of womanly wisdom, carefully preserved for future generations. And here was hers, turned up again like the proverbial bad penny, as blank as the day she’d received it.
She opened it gingerly, staring at the inscription. To Elzibeth—It’s Time to write your story.
Not Elizabeth. Elzibeth. She couldn’t even have a normal name.
At sixteen, she’d wanted no part of the tradition—or any other part of her family’s strange legacy. She’d wanted to be normal, like other people. And so she’d put the journal in a drawer and ignored it.
Holding it now, after so many years, felt like an indictment, a reminder that in spurning this sacred family custom, she had turned her back on everything her grandmother had lived, taught, and believed. She could have pretended for Althea’s sake, gone along with what was expected of her and filled the journal with silly scribblings. Even normal girls kept diaries—pink things with hearts on the cover and flimsy brass locks to keep snoopers at bay. But she’d been too stubborn to go along, determined to break with the Moon tradition and map her own future. She’d done it too, if the shiny new plaque on her office door was any indication—from freshman at Dickerson to intern at Worldwide to creative director of Chenier Fragrances, Ltd., all in the space of eight years.
But six months after her coveted promotion, she was still trying to wrap her arms around the new position and the recent flurry of changes in her life. There hadn’t been time to tell Althea—at least that’s what she’d been telling herself. The truth was their communication had grown increasingly spotty over the years. Not out of laziness, but out of guilt. It felt wrong to crow about her success when her grandmother had been forced to watch her own life’s work—her beloved farm—wither and die. Instead, she’d convinced herself the checks she sent from time to time would atone for an eight-year absence, for letters that went unanswered and phone calls that came only rarely. They didn’t, of course. Nothing could. And now it was too late to tell Althea anything.
She tried to digest it—a world without Althea Moon—but couldn’t manage it somehow. How could such a woman, so rich in wisdom, life, and love, who seemed to have sprung from the very soil she loved and tended, ever be gone?
She’d never mentioned being sick. Not once in all her long, newsy letters. Yet Evangeline Broussard’s letter had mentioned a prolonged illness. Why would Althea have kept such a thing from her?
“Ah, you’re here—finally.”
Lizzy blinked back a fresh sting of tears, dismayed to find Luc Chenier hovering in her office doorway. He’d just had a haircut, and looked even more devastating than usual in his ubertailored black Brioni. He knew it too, which used to annoy her when they were seeing each other, but didn’t anymore.
She sniffed away the remnants of her tears. The last thing she needed was to be caught crying at her desk by the man who’d just green-lighted her promotion—or to be peppered with uncomfortable questions, which she would be if he thought for a minute that she was holding something back. She glanced up at him, hoping to appear unruffled as she swept the journal into her lap and out of sight.
“Did you need something?”
He turned on the smile, recently whitened by the look of it. “I came looking for you at lunchtime, but they said you had a meeting.”
“I was with marketing, trying to nail down the concepts for the new print campaign. We’re not quite there yet, but we should have—”
Luc cut her off with the wave of a hand. “Come out with me after work. I was going to take you to lunch, but dinner’s better, don’t you think?”
No, she didn’t think, though it didn’t surprise her that he did. He was used to getting his way. And why wouldn’t he be? The man positively oozed charm. It didn’t hurt that he looked like Johnny Depp without
