Chapter 5

At three o'clock, Bitsy found Nora at the seawall with the box of her life at her feet.

She came down the grass in the cream linen shift and the navy club blazer, heels sinking slightly in the turf, and she sat on the wall six feet away like a woman sharing a bench at a bus stop.

"I want this to end well for you," Bitsy said. "I mean that."

Nora watched the harbor.

"Twelve months' pay. A reference I'll write myself, and it will be a good one. The cottage through October, so you have time to find something." Bitsy turned her ring with her thumb, once, twice. "In exchange, you sign a resignation this afternoon and you don't talk to anyone about the cup. Especially not the woman in the navy suit."

"Alma Reyes."

"Alma Reyes." Bitsy said the name slowly, tasting it. "She's here for the October review. I'd rather she find a clean house."

"Would you," Nora said.

"Don't." Bitsy's voice stayed warm. "You're not a lawyer and you're not a bookkeeper. You're the deckhand who couldn't read a ledger. That's how this ends if you make it a fight."

Nora turned and looked at her then, full in the face, for the first time all day. Bitsy's smile held. Her eyes did not.

"The purchase book is foundation property," Bitsy said. "It's already in my office."

"Then you should keep it there," Nora said.

Bitsy stood and brushed nothing off her skirt. "Twelve months. Until six tonight." She walked back up the lawn toward the tent.

At a quarter past three, Delphine found Nora at the shed and shut the door behind her. She pulled the carbon out of her pocket and flattened it on the desk.

"Inside pocket of my bag," she said. "Purchase order 2019-114. A hundred and forty dollars to a P.O. box. Serial FW-19-0114." She looked up. "You put it there."

"I kept it there."

"Why?"

"Because paper in a pocket looks like nothing," Nora said. "Paper in a file looks like evidence, and evidence gets taken."

Delphine's hands were shaking a little. "Tell me what to do."

"Nothing yet." Nora folded the carbon and slid it back across the desk. "Clock out. Take the afternoon. Go home."

"No."

"You'll lose your job."

"Maybe."

Nora studied her for a moment. Then she nodded once, the way she nodded at the dock when a boat came in badly and there was nothing to say about it until later.

"Be behind the bar at four-thirty," she said. "When the applause starts, turn the cup over under the pendant light and say what you see. Loud enough for the whole room."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

At twenty to four, Bitsy unlocked the north cabinet, lifted the cup out of its bin, and handed it to Delphine in the corridor outside the ballroom.

"Polish it," she said. "Put it on the tray at four-thirty, right in the middle, where the photographer can see it. It's the family's cup. It should be in the photographs."

The cup was cold when Delphine took it, and then it was warm from her hands, and it weighed almost nothing at all.