Anything for a quiet life. It was her mantra, and a joke in the family. Eunice had given her an elaborate purple velvet-and-silk pillow with those words embroidered on it. Caroline kept it on her bed, the one spot of color in her cool white bedroom.

No matter how Caroline felt about this letter, about him, about the trouble he was bringing down on her head, she would never allow it to come to the surface, just as she kept everything else just out of touch. The evening he asked her to marry him she had smiled so sweetly and turned her face to his shoulder and trembled. Because she was happy, he had thought then, because—he remembered resorting to cliché without hesitation—still waters run deep.

Once he set himself the task of examining the things he had so studiously ignored for the past year, John found he couldn’t stop. Caroline’s solemn nature, her shyness, her inability to stand up to her family when it came to something as basic as her own wedding, all these things he pulled forth from his memory like rabbits out of a hat, and taken together they spelled out an indictment, not of her but of himself. He had treated her no better than her sisters; he had used her as a mirror, and she had done that job well, reflecting back to him what he wanted to see. Now John promised himself that sometime, somehow, he would confess this failing to her and ask her forgiveness.

Rob said, “We’re just about there. You’re sure you want to do this?”

His first impulse was to brush the question off, but John caught his brother’s glance in the rearview mirror, wary, concerned.

Step by step he reviewed what must come. He would hand this letter over to whichever nun came to the door. Caroline would read it, tonight or tomorrow morning, and with that, their engagement would be ended. Sometime in the next few days Caroline would make the announcement that the wedding was off, because he had left it up to her to decide how best to do that. She might come home to Ogilvie, or find a phone and call one of her sisters or, more likely, her mother. At that point, the wedding guests would be contacted and the rumor mill would go into overdrive. When he showed his face in town, he would be accosted on the street by third and fourth cousins, Caroline’s and his own, who believed it their right to hear the whole story of what went wrong, and who was at fault. No matter what story Caroline told, no matter how kind she was to him in the telling of it, blame would be parceled out, the largest portion would fall to him. Because he deserved it, first of all, for getting into this situation.