Chapter 3

Cordelia sat down at Willa's kitchen table without being asked, the way she had sat down in every room of Willa's life for twenty years.

"I want to make this simple," she said.

Willa poured nothing. She stood with her back against the sink.

"I'm retiring you," Cordelia said. "Full salary through the end of the year, your pension, and forty thousand dollars. You keep the cottage as long as you want it. You sign this, and it's over today." She laid a folded paper and a pen on the oilcloth. "No one prosecutes an old woman who retires."

Willa looked at the paper but did not touch it.

"You think I took the garnets," she said.

Cordelia's throat flushed. "I know you didn't."

"Then you put them in my apron."

"I'm not going to say that." Cordelia's hands were flat on the table, pressing hard enough to whiten at the knuckles. "I'm going to say this. Trip is twenty-seven. He has a daughter. He has a daughter, Willa."

"Those garnets aren't worth forty thousand dollars," Willa said. "So the check isn't about garnets."

Cordelia stood up so fast the chair legs scraped. She left the check and the paper on the table and walked out to the lane, where her car had been idling the whole time with the air conditioning on.

Willa did not sign anything. She took the staff van keys off the hook, drove out to Wadmalaw, and parked at the gate.

It was half past two. The tent was still up. The long table had been cleared of oysters and reset with flowers for the evening, and the guests had drifted down toward the water. Nobody stopped her. Nobody looked at her at all, which was its own kind of looking.

She walked out on the dock.

The boat lay against the pilings, white hull, blue trim. MISS CORDELIA, painted on the transom in letters the color of a robin's egg, named for the woman who had signed the papers.

Trip was in the cockpit, coiling line.

"Miss Willa," he said. "You can't be here."

"I know it."

He looked past her, up at the house, and she turned and saw Cordelia on the porch, phone in hand, watching.

Willa looked down at the deck boards. In the seam between two planks, caught in old varnish, was a fleck of gold leaf about the size of a thumbnail, the kind that flakes off a frame when something heavy is set down too hard. She picked it up without thinking and wrapped it in a tissue from her sleeve.

"Whatever you think you saw," Trip said quietly, "you didn't see it."

Willa looked at him a long moment. He had been six years old the first summer she taught him to fold a napkin. He had a rope burn on his right palm.

From the porch, Cordelia's voice carried across the grass, clear and pleasant, the voice she used on donors.

"You should have taken the check, Willa."