“Wow,” Cora said, when she was finished, and dusted her palms together like she’d just done hard work.

“Right?” Esther reopened the book to give herself something to do with her hands.

Turning from me, she was the brightest thing against the night, imprinted on my eye as afterimage and visual defect. I thought of Apollo and Daphne, of coming, finally, upon her as her body took an untouchable rigidity. If I could have seen her soft face at the edge of the river. If she had a real, human face. If I could turn her over and make a charm of her. That would have mattered. I think it would have mattered very much.

Esther has imagined reading Anais’s paragraphs as love poetry.

Cora smiled, stretched until her spine gave a ratcheting crack. “Yeah. It’s pretty spooky.”

Esther waited. She pressed her hand on the arm of the love seat, muscle quivering a little under her own weight. She was suddenly afraid the sofa would collapse beneath her. Esther thought of how this story had made her feel the first time she read it, vivisected and pinned open, all the softest, pinkest parts of her exposed. And then every reading after, as if Anais reached into that gap and pressed a curious finger to Esther’s heart, softly fondled the sack of her lung. The sweet stab of being touched somewhere so vulnerable, the low, sharp shock of being handled so tenderly. She didn’t want to lead Cora to water, didn’t want to have to. I mean, it’s there, right? Esther thought, and her skin tightened with embarrassment she couldn’t pinpoint the origin of. Don’t you see it too?

Cora’s lip flicked up, a nervous flash of white teeth. She laid a hand light against Esther’s knee. “It’s beautiful. I get why you like it so much.”

* * *

The first page in the box is brittle. Esther swallows a dusty breath, does a little marveling: Anais’s handwriting, her sketches, her stories outlined in her jagged print, and then her typewritten manuscripts. Esther can imagine her at her writing desk, the kind with a rolltop and twenty little drawers, an antique delicately carved with flowers and scrolls in perfect complement to her clicking at her typewriter.

This letter is from Anais’s sister. July 1937. Anais would have been in college. Esther knows she can’t read every letter. She and Cora are in D.C. for three days, and Esther has promised to reserve one of those days to spend together. But she can read this one.

Annie,

Have seen the grades you have sent home. I hope you are trying to improve your French now, but otherwise very good! Mother & Father & I are all very proud of you. Am including a postcard Father wrote you from London. He does not have your address yet.

I should tell you that Roger is sick. Am sorry to start the letter like this, but I think he is going to die before you return in summer, and I don’t want to have to surprise you with it. I will take some pictures of him so that you will have them after he is gone, but he is not as handsome as he was when you left. Has lost most of his fur.