“Come here, you,” said Fee.

“Mother-daughter moment,” Sophie told Jamie as Fee and Emma hugged. “Sorry about that, those two are full of them lately.”

“I think they look sweet,” said Jamie, rummaging in the pocket of his jeans; happiness had made him sentimental.

“Then you’re a silly old thing,” said Sophie, handing him a tissue. “And we’ll have to stock up on these, because it’s going to get much worse before she leaves for North Dakota.”

It was time, thought Lulu, then. Time to share the secret she had guarded for nearly a year now, time to bring the letters from the dark of the attic and into the light-filled house to show them to her mother and sisters, time to extend to them, too, the pleasure that had been hers of meeting Grandma Jo. She sighed a little, then smiled to herself, took a deep breath, stood up, and rapped a spoon on her coffee mug for attention.

“I want you all to listen,” she said. “Because I’ve got something to say, okay? Now, I know you know I’ve been spending a lot of time in the attic lately, and I’m sure you’ve all been wondering what I’ve been doing up there, and now I’m going to tell you.”

Emma looked at her through narrowed eyes. “If you’ve found Grandma Cissie’s recipes,” she said, “and you’re going to bring them down here to criticize them, would you please do me a special wedding favor and wait till after we’ve left for our honeymoon?”

“It’s not the recipes,” Lulu told her. She had never found the recipes, in fact. They were gone with Grandma Jo’s books, it seemed, vanished into the void where some once-cherished items do eventually go, left forgotten on a shelf somewhere, or fallen behind a bookcase, or carelessly stuffed into a bag for a charity shop; Cissie Bhaer Fraser’s recipes were gone forever, and no one would ever know now what foods she had liked to cook in her kitchen nearly a hundred years ago, or how she had liked to cook them. But parts of the past would always disappear, and Lulu was luckier than most; Liam did not even know who his grandfather was. And, missing or not, the recipes had proved their worth and more, because it was searching for them that had brought her to find Grandma Jo.

“I never did find the recipes,” she said. “But I did find something else. It’s something that’s sort of amazing and a little bit magical, that’s about all of us. I’ve probably been a bit selfish in keeping it to myself for all this time, but it’s something that I needed to do for a while, and when you see it, I hope you’ll understand why I needed it all to myself, and also understand why I don’t need it so much now, not any longer. Anyway, I’m not going to say any more, I’m just going to go up there and get it now and bring it down to show you.”