Esther leaves Cora sleeping, a warm, graceful curve under the quilt. She walks to the library and asks the librarian if he can search the senders of the letters in Anais’s papers. She asks him to search for letters from an Emilia Obel, please, and he taps the name into his computer in the jagged rhythm of a movie typist. His tweed is brown today. He pulls only one folder, pages through it with slick, careful fingers, and hands Esther the letter she has already read.

The page crinkles in her grip. “Thank you,” she says, and smooths the paper back down into the file. “Could I have Box Thirty-One, please?”

He shrugs. “Should I take this back?”

“Yes, please.”

Esther tells herself the beginning of “Housecat, Wildcat” until there is no more shaking in her hands.

On the morning before I went away to boarding school, my mother made eggs for breakfast and let me take one to tell my fortune. I poured the egg white into hot water and picked out shapes in the cooking tendrils: a star, a leopard, the lifting anchor of a ship. Something very beautiful was going to happen to me. My suitcase stood by the door, full of dark blue socks and oxford shirts, waiting. But I did not want to go to Rowland Girls’ School. I wanted to crawl under the porch stairs, lie down, forget language, let my teeth fall out, and become a soft, sleeping animal.

Esther finds the letter, uncut and unbracketed.

Harold,

Thank you for the letter. It came at the most brutally unkind of times. Gertrude has caught the flu, and Ben has got it from her. L has exiled himself to the far corners of the house so his Work may not be interfered with.

Do not think I overlooked the review you sent. I wish you wouldn’t. Am beginning to think that the people who write for newspapers do not read books at all. I am including L in this because I know that he does not. There is nothing else to say about it.

It’s not that it’s very important to me, Harold, but I do wish, actually, that you hadn’t alerted me to this. It’s not worth my thinking about. Except that I wonder if it’s possible, anymore, to say anything and be understood. I write a story about a woman, and I am all at once a pervert. I find myself wondering, you know, if it is worth writing at all. If it is impossible to be understood, if it is only possible to be corrupted, and to be so vulgarly corrupted, is it worth writing at all?