She put down the brush she was running through her hair and met her own eyes in the mirror. A correspondence would be nothing more than a series of tiny, painful paper cuts. Little dribs and drabs of information, the occasional, casual update about what Sam was doing, whom he was seeing, perhaps one day whom he was marrying—no. She picked the brush up again and started pulling it through her hair angrily, yanking at the tangles until her scalp burned. There could not be a correspondence between her and Maggie.

But she could still find the catalogues and send them.

Forty-five minutes after waking she walked into the lobby, scanning until she found Sam’s shaggy blond head towering over everyone around him. He was leaning against a pillar, sketching something in his notebook, with a pencil smudge on his cheek and his hair already pulled into disarray.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Mmmm,” he said, continuing to scribble. An unwelcome smile threatened to disarrange her carefully neutral expression, so instead she rolled her eyes and sat down in a nearby chair to observe the lobby. He’d surface when he surfaced.

Two minutes later, he threw himself into the chair across from her.

“I’ve had a letter from Mrs. Kay,” he began without preamble. “You look beautiful this morning, by the way. She visited the old butler last night, and she says she has something for us.”

“God bless gossips,” Alva said, a thrumming excitement building under her skin. Maybe this trip would produce answers after all.

“I wish all my research assistants were as efficient,” Sam said. “Shall we?”

They took a cab to Mrs. Kay’s. It was a dark morning, the kind where the sun hasn’t fully decided whether to come up or not, but the streets were quick and loud and busy. Alva stared out the window as the driver navigated between horses and unloading vehicles and children darting out suddenly into the middle of the road, thinking how little of the city she’d known while she was growing up. For Alva, Manhattan was her bedroom at her parents’ house, the small schoolroom on the same floor, the grand, quiet street that her parents and all their acquaintances lived on. The small, exclusive park a short walk away. Later, during her courtship with Alain, her world had expanded to the ballrooms and dining rooms of other people’s houses. Boarding the ship for France the day of her wedding had been the first time she’d ever even visited New York Harbor.

There was so much more world here than she’d known.

The cab pulled in front of Mrs. Kay’s tidy brownstone. Sam paid the driver and helped Alva down. There was a twitch in one of the lace curtains; the lady of the house had obviously been waiting. The door was opened by the same rosy maid as the day before.