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Ginny wrestled until the clock's hands teetered on four, then she sat up, groaning aloud. She shoved her feet into her scuffs, dug the letter from her stack of junk mail, and crept down the stairs to the kitchen, taking care not to waken her landlady. She heated a little milk, spooned coffee into the filter for automatic drip, and slipped her fingernail beneath the letter's seal.

Dear Miss Pickering,

Harold dead... and with a family. Sixty-nine wasn't that old, but somehow his death didn't surprise her. That he'd married and had children should not have. Not much surprised Ginny. Still, there was no reason she should be contacted. He certainly would not have wished it. She'd been written out of her family's life and will fifty years before. Harold had made certain she understood that.

Could she mourn him? Did she feel anything at all? Ginny wasn't sure.

The name Skipwith rang a distant bell, conjuring images of a suited and portly man sporting only a ring of frizzy gray hair around the perimeter of his skull. A kindly enough man with a gruff exterior. He can't possibly still be practicing.

Ginny set the letter down, poured her coffee, and walked out to the screened porch. Cloaked in darkness, she nestled beneath a quilt in the white wicker rocker and waited for the sun to rise, waited for the morning and its light.

It was hard to take in, Harold's dying. No matter that he'd disowned her, had refused her letters, had written words that stabbed Ginny's heart like a knife, he was her brother. Her last living relative, except, of course, for whatever "his family" meant. She closed her eyes. Harold married, with children—a family? She knew nothing about him, not since the night she'd left home, except that he'd wanted nothing to do with her.

Losing Daddy, losing the baby, Mama and Harold cutting her off, and finally Curtis coming home forever changed—even after all these years, all of that weighed too heavy. She pushed those memories away.

Black gave way to gray light on the horizon. The first purple streaks across the sky made things seem not so cruel as they had in the dark of night. Harold's gone. I'm not sorry, and I am sorry. But, maybe, is this an open window?

Harold could no longer stop her going back. Not that she wanted to "go back," but a trip to New Scrivelsby before leaving the States might be her only opportunity to visit her parents' graves on the farm and say a real goodbye, something she'd given up hope of ever doing.

Ginny waited until ten o'clock. Surely even legal offices opened by ten. She phoned the number on the letterhead and made an appointment with the woman who answered the phone for Friday at one o'clock. That would give her the rest of the week to work up her nerve and then the weekend to recuperate from the trip—a very short trip.

* * *

With a stop or two along the way, New Scrivelsby, Virginia, was a five-hour drive. During the war, she and Curtis had believed there would be work in Cape May County. After the war, after Curtis had returned so changed, Ginny hadn't cared to move. She'd settled, made a few friends, and found her own work in the gardening center, small pay though it was. And Cape May County was a reasonable distance from New Scrivelsby—far enough that Ginny'd always known her family would not come looking for her, not so far away that she couldn't get back home if she ever needed to, if she ever received invitation or permission to return. She hadn't.

One suitcase holding three days' worth of clothes, two books she'd been meaning to read, a thermos of black coffee, a bag of popcorn, an apple, and a chicken sandwich for the road was plenty. Bare-bones staples, that's all she'd take—as well as the tools needed for the flowers she intended to plant on her parents' grave.