That’s all I will write for I think I have tired myself at last and might even sleep an hour before the dawn comes. Bless you for reading so far.

With love from,

Jo.

Lulu finished the letter and sat staring for some time into the jumble of packing cases and broken furniture, turning the thin paper between her fingers. On the rare occasions when she had thought seriously of Grandma Jo, it had been always as an old woman, rigid in her ways and stern in her principles. But the woman who had written this letter was young—young and uncertain and torn with the pain of a loss Lulu now realized she could not begin to comprehend. Lulu had so far been happily unacquainted with too close a reality of death, although she had had friends from school and college who had lost one or the other parent; and she remembered now that there had been a girl in the year above her at St. Andrew’s, a girl whom she had not known well, with thick brown hair and a broad friendly face, who had been killed in a skiing accident during a Christmas holiday. It occurred to her now to wonder whether that girl had had a sister, and, if so, how she could bear to live on.

“Lulu-belle! Looby-Lulu!”

Lulu jumped at the sound of Sophie’s voice, rising from the landing below and wrenching her from the thoughts of a young woman who had lived to be old, mourning a sister who had not.

“What is it?” she called down the ladder, shocking herself by the sound of her own everyday voice, echoing from this room that held such ghosts from the past.

“Mom wants to know if you’ve been eaten by the spiders yet. You’ve been up there for over an hour.”

“I’m coming down now.”

Lulu replaced the letters and other objects into the case, set it back beside the bookshelf, and climbed down the ladder to join Sophie, child of the twenty-first century in worn jeans and a white blouse patterned with giant red daisies—Sophie had recently discovered the joys of vintage clothes markets.

“You were there for ages,” she said. “You’re covered with dust. What did you find?”

“Nothing much,” said Lulu. “Lots and lots of bits of old paper and some photographs of Mom at the women’s collective. But I forgot to bring them down; I’ll go up again later and get them.”

“Mom’s feeling guilty,” said Sophie. “She thinks she’s Hurt Your Feelings and you’re sitting up there sobbing quietly into a little lace hankie.”

“No, I’m fine,” said Lulu. “Just got a bit carried away looking at the photographs.”

“Well, don’t tell her that! Let her go on feeling guilty, and maybe she’ll break out those posh chocolates she’s got hidden in her bedroom.”

“What’s it like?” said Lulu. “To be without standards or shame? As a scientist, I’m curious.”

“Aha!” said Charlie as the two entered the kitchen, arm in arm. “It’s the girl who never touches her sisters.”