Cora’s arm closes around her shoulders, and Esther realizes she is steering her away from the road, which, yes, she’d been about to step into.

“It makes sense to go in order,” Esther protests, leaning her cheek into Cora’s thready coat. “But everything by the end of tomorrow. I promise.”

Cora lets it go so easily that it makes Esther’s stomach hurt. Cora chatters amicably about her morning, some monuments and an exhibit on Japanese photography. She takes her phone out and swipes through photographs, a child blowing a bubble so big that it distorts her, a model splayed in a field before a bridge, her robe falling away from an exposed breast. She is so stark, so confrontationally beautiful, that Esther looks away with a hard swallow bobbing in her throat.

Once they are in a coffee shop, the cold safely behind glass walls, Esther cannot keep herself from talking about Anais. She reels off what she has seen today. The letters, recipes, postcards, photographs. Photographs of Anais have always made Esther feel strange because she doesn’t look anything like how Esther pictures her. The Anais Casey on the book jackets is a broad, prematurely aged woman with wiry, thinning hair and a small, wicked mouth like the beak of a jackdaw. She is clearly not comfortable smiling at the camera. And she is a good deal heavier than the woman Esther imagines, which is the part Esther feels guiltiest about. She too is always skinnier in her own fantasies.

Esther focuses on the letters, which have been wonderful. She has learned the kind of pen Anais made notes with, a black Sheaffer Admiral #5, that the first room she rented had a wasp nest, that as a toddler she was scolded for biting people. All this reality an embarrassment of riches. Cora is patient as Esther details letters from Victoria, from her parents, her school friends, her professors, her husband.

That is when Cora interrupts. “She was married?”

Esther thought she’d mentioned this. She shrugs, defensive. “What else was she supposed to do?”

* * *

Anais Hamilton met Leonard Casey in 1942. He was drafted in 1943. There isn’t information about Anais’s earlier relationships, and though they wrote to each other while he was away, they weren’t engaged until his return. This is something Esther holds on to, all that “cat’s away” time unaccounted for.

Casey was an arts reporter, not really anyone who would be known anymore. He does not have his own collection in the Library of Congress, and probably today his articles are read only by people researching his wife. Esther mostly skimmed over them in the biographies. She had always assumed that Leonard Casey was something that happened to Anais, something she had to accept, like a bad review, a social obligation.

On his letters to his future wife, Leonard Casey made sketches. He drew uneven cartoons of other soldiers, a jagged mountain range at the end of a paragraph, a miniature starburst of an anise seed near the top, labeled, so that his charm wouldn’t be overshadowed by his poor artistry. And he was charming, easy, and amusing. Esther dreads having a grander picture of him, something like the war letters she’s seen in documentaries, the acute earnestness of someone facing death. But Leonard Casey had not confronted his mortality by the time Esther had to break for lunch. Anais’s responses are not included. Esther wonders what Leonard did with them. Unfortunately, he seems like the kind of man who would have treasured them in his breast pocket.