There are only a few other people in the reading room. A fair-haired woman, perhaps a graduate student, in a red wool coat poking at her pink phone instead of the daunting stack of papers next to her; a frail man holding a trembling magnifying glass over a scroll of paper; a broad woman in a floral dress who keeps lifting a hand to her cap of curls to twist the strands. In the corner a gray water fountain hums, and the room smells of dust and distant cologne. It is not at all spiritual in the way Esther expected, but she still feels choked and uncertain of her own worth.

The librarian wheels out the cart, tells her, “Boxes one through six,” with soft disinterest.

Esther thanks him, watches him amble back to his desk; watches the blond girl finally lose interest in her phone and, with a delicacy that Esther would not have credited her, lift the first page on her pile; watches the old man lay down his magnifying glass as if he needs to rest from it; thinks of snow crunching under Cora’s shoes as she meanders toward the nearest museum. In this way she delays opening the first box.

* * *

Anais has a story, “The Stoddard Woods Angel,” about a newlywed woman. Her husband isn’t cruel, and he doesn’t beat her. He’s fine. She doesn’t mind him. But she keeps seeing a woman in the woods. The woman may be a ghost, always disappearing around blind corners. The new wife unspools pages and pages thinking about her—her fingers like slivers of light, her face a bowl of still water, her incredible, inevitable strangeness. The wife wants to know her so badly.

One evening, the wife is eating dinner with her husband, dry meat loaf and greens. She stands while he is speaking to her. She watches his mouth continue to work on its hinges, and turns from it. She walks into the uncanny darkness of the woods, intending to keep walking until she meets the woman, but the woman only appears to her at a distance. She is too like the strange and pale trees, and the ashen trees too like her. The wife comes close, is within fingertips’ distance of her hem, then the woman disappears, reappearing a little farther off. Again and again this happens until the wife is hopelessly lost, not wishing, exactly, to go back, but out among the strange trees and alone.

* * *

All three of Anais Casey’s biographers agree that she wasn’t a lesbian. Only two of the books even reference sexuality. Esther emailed the biographers one at a time. The third was the first to respond, and his answer was a pretty clear negative. Only one of the other two replied, the woman who wrote Kitchen Witch: The Life & Writing of Anais Casey. She said, “Look, anyone can lie about anything in a letter. It’s impossible to know every relevant detail. We can know what she said and say what we think is likely. I think it’s unlikely.” It was nice of her to write back.