Elise looked at the page for a long time. “It's possible,” she admitted. “Your father told me he had a sister who worked with children. But I don't know if this is her.” She wanted to call Grant before doing anything else. Penny's face closed at the suggestion. “He'll say it's not important,” she answered. Elise almost contradicted her, then remembered the Sunday lunches and the way Penny's questions had been waved away. She folded the printout carefully. “Then let's ask your grandmother ourselves.”
Margaret stared at the picture at her kitchen table. Her lips moved before any words came out. “Vivi,” she whispered. It had been years since Penny had heard anyone use the nickname. Margaret reached toward the screen as if she could smooth a loose strand of hair away from the woman's forehead. “She looks tired,” she said. “She always looked tired when she was trying to be brave.”
Penny placed her hand beside Margaret's. “Can we write to her?” Margaret did not answer at once. She stood up, walked to the kitchen window, and looked toward the lilac tree. “I wrote letters,” she said finally. “I wrote them when I thought it was already too late.” Penny was careful not to ask the obvious question. She had learned that a person sometimes needed silence long enough to step through it.
The story came out in pieces. In 1994, Vivian had won a scholarship and wanted to leave Millbrook to become a teacher. Her father, Harold Bennett, had expected her to stay and help run the family's small printing shop. He was proud of being the man who decided things, and he treated disagreement as betrayal. On the night Vivian packed her suitcase, Harold told her that if she walked through the door she should not expect to be welcomed back. Margaret had stood beside the refrigerator and said nothing.
“I thought he'd calm down,” she told Penny. “I thought she'd come back for Thanksgiving and we'd all pretend it hadn't happened.” But Vivian didn't come home for Thanksgiving. Harold told the family she was stubborn and ungrateful. Years passed, and the words repeated often enough that everyone forgot they were one man's version of an argument. “I knew she was lonely,” Margaret said, pressing her fingers to her eyes. “I let her be lonely anyway.”
After Harold died eight years earlier, Margaret had found four unopened letters wedged behind a panel in his old desk. They were addressed to her in Vivian's handwriting. The first was dated just weeks after Vivian left, the second a year later, the third after she graduated, and the fourth after she married a man named Thomas Rhodes. The letters contained ordinary things: stories about classes, an invitation to a graduation ceremony, a photograph of a small apartment, questions about Daniel and Grant. Nothing in them resembled the contempt Harold had claimed his daughter felt.