“The real estate agent thinks it will show better furnished, if that’s all right with you,” Sammi said. “And of course, if you like, you can just sell it furnished and not have to bother with all this stuff.”

“Let’s sell it furnished,” Letty said. Tanya had loved the opulence of her home, had reveled in how far she’d come since that long-ago double-wide in West Virginia, but none of the gilt-edged furnishings held any sentiment or attraction for Letty.

She and the lawyer walked from room to room, snapping on the lights, looking around, and then moving on.

They climbed the stairs and went into Maya’s bedroom. The fairy-tale furnishings that Tanya had obsessed over seemed garish and overdone now. “You don’t think Maya wants any of these toys or books?” Sammi asked, gesturing at the shelves overloaded with picture books and playthings. She pointed at the large walk-in closet. “What about all those beautiful clothes?”

“She’s got Ellie, the only toy she really cares about,” Letty said. “And she’s outgrown all her clothes. Let’s donate it all to a children’s charity.”

Sammi hesitated in the hallway outside Tanya’s bedroom. “Do you want to go in there?” She gestured at the closed door. “I know this must be hard for you.”

Letty’s hand grasped the crystal doorknob. “I need to make sure there’s nothing of Tanya’s that she’d want Maya to have. Let’s just rip off the Band-Aid, shall we?”

Inside the bedroom, she trailed her fingers over the mirrored dressing table arrayed with Tanya’s cut-glass bottles of perfume and the row of sterling-mounted brushes and combs neatly arranged on the tabletop. Letty opened a deep drawer and stared down at all the bottles of foundation, the eye shadow palettes and eyeliner pencils and tubes of mascara. She closed the drawer and opened another, finding the small silver-mounted baby brush Tanya had used to brush Maya’s curls before bed every night. She put the brush in her purse and closed the drawer.

Sammi stood near the enormous walk-in closet, gazing in. “It’s like being back in Bergdorf Goodman’s,” she whispered, as though she were in a church instead of a dead woman’s bedroom.

Letty smiled. “I’m not going to keep any of these things, but if there’s anything you’d like, Sammi, please, help yourself. That’s what Tanya would want.”

“She was always so generous,” Sammi said, stepping into the closet. “So spontaneous. If I commented on a pair of earrings she was wearing, or a pair of yoga pants, the next thing I knew, she’d insist on giving them to me.”

“That was Tanya,” Letty agreed. She went over to the freestanding jewelry cabinet in the middle of the closet and rifled through the velvet-lined drawers. She didn’t know or care which pieces were costume or which were the real thing.