“I couldn’t bring myself to change it,” I said. “It felt like we’d be erasing her from existence. I don’t know what it was like here in 1972, but in 2015, it was crammed fuller than a museum. It probably could have been a museum.”

“Georgina always collected things,” Eleanor said. “Mementos. People.”

“But in the end, this was all she had, and we had to get rid of so much of it,” I said. “It felt like there should be a piece of her still here.”

Eleanor’s gaze went out the window. I wondered if she was imagining what might have been if the sisters had stayed close. If Georgina hadn’t made a play for her sister’s husband. If they’d let their differences die when Henry did.

“Do you still have those journals?” she asked suddenly.

“Of course. Do you want to see them?”

Eleanor raised an eyebrow. I walked over to my dresser and opened up the drawer where they all lived. I glanced briefly at the doors to Sex Den. The letter and the mystery key had lived up there safely since I’d hidden them, but I couldn’t very well reveal it to her by bounding through the armoire to fetch them. I itched to ask her about the key, but this house had to have two hundred locks; the odds of anyone knowing what went where were as minute and slim as the key itself. Better to keep it to myself for now. All of it.

“The letter isn’t in here. I put that in the safe,” I said, figuring it was an acceptable white lie. “But I have all these.” I took out the weathered leather journals and brought them back to the Queen, resting them on the gold-painted table to her right. Eleanor picked one up, flipping through it idly, her hands stopping to trace Georgina’s penmanship—exuberant and round. She riffled the pages with her thumb, stopping at random and beginning to read out loud: