“We want you to enjoy your stay here in Edenton, Miss Dale,” he said, and she wondered if the men she’d had lunch with had put their heads together and decided to quit talking about the artist they wished they had for the post office mural—Martin Drapple—and embrace the artist they were stuck with instead.

She was tired by the time she returned to Miss Myrtle’s. Freda silently gave her a coconut cookie and a smile, along with a note from Miss Myrtle, telling Anna she was at her garden club, which apparently met all year long. Anna went up to her spacious room with its pink bed and sachet-scented air to write in her journal.

Tomorrow, she wrote, Mr. Toby Fiering will take me on a tour of the cotton mill.

She tried to imagine what that would be like, but every time her mind drifted from her writing, she was back in that shadowy warehouse once again.

Chapter 11. Morgan

Chapter 11

MORGAN

June 15, 2018

My new laptop was delivered at eleven that morning. I felt nervous as I set it up on the dining room table and connected to my e-mail address. I scrolled through ancient e-mail until the pain was too much for me. That mail was from another time, another world, before everything had gone to hell. There was a glut of e-mail from my former classmates at UNC about assignments and parties. Not a lot of e-mail from Trey. He’d mostly texted and all my texts were long gone with my old phone number. Just as well. The last e-mail from him read simply, Chill, babe, and I had no idea what it was regarding, since it had been sent before the accident, when I’d had nothing in my life I needed to chill about. I stared at his e-mail address, filling with a mixture of hurt and venom. He’d ruined my life and saved his own. Even after he realized how much trouble I was in, he did nothing to help me. Instead, he dug my grave deeper. I was tempted to e-mail him. Tell him exactly what I thought of him now. But it would be a mistake. E-mailing him—contacting any of my friends from my old life—would be a mistake I couldn’t afford to make. In a moment of supreme willpower, I erased my mail. All of it. I wasn’t going to live in the past. I needed to be in the here and now, and it felt good to see the empty mail box. The blank slate.