He expected to feel some sort of validation, or regret that he and his father had never had the chance to talk about Julian. But there was just the realization that they had wasted a hell of a lot of energy pretending that neither one of them cared.

“Ruth is going to be disappointed,” he said.

Allie looked up from turning the pages. “Why?”

“She thought there would be some grand emotional response to the information that my father read my books after all.”

“Doesn’t it give you some happiness? All these years you thought he couldn’t be bothered, but he valued the books so much he read them and then carefully resealed them.” Her eyes were soft with sorrow.

“In secret. Without saying a word to me.” He could hear the harshness in his voice.

“He couldn’t admit to you that he was wrong, but at least he knew it himself.” She put the book down and lifted out two more, examining the tape. “These were also unwrapped.”

“Is Level Best in there?”

“Your first book?” She began making a pile of hardcovers as she unloaded more of the box.

“It would be a mass-market paperback.” He should help her, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch the books his father had maintained a stubborn silence about.

She stacked a few more hardcovers before she began pulling out paperbacks. “Here it . . . what’s this?” She put down the books and reached in so her arm was hidden practically up to her shoulder. Straightening, she came up with a freezer-size plastic baggie filled with large, brightly colored envelopes. She turned the baggie over and went still.

“What is it?” he asked as a shapeless fear spread through his chest like ice.

She lifted her gaze to meet his. “They’re addressed to you.”

In two strides, he was at her side, staring down at the packet in her hands. He recognized the writing.

It was his mother’s.

The sight of it walloped him in the gut like a mule’s kick. For a long moment he couldn’t suck enough breath into his lungs.

He had the note from her locket, as well as a grocery list he’d found in the trash after she’d abandoned him. His father had destroyed all the photographs of his first wife, and as hard as Gavin had tried to retain it, his mother’s image had faded and blurred in his mind. So her handwriting had become his most tangible memory of her.

“Is Susannah your mother’s name?” Allie asked, her voice a caress of worry and caring.

He nodded.

“You didn’t know about these?”

He forced his voice past the fist trying to close up his throat. “My father must have intercepted them.” The implications slammed the breath out of him again. “I—”

And then Allie’s hands were guiding him down into the desk chair. “You need to sit. I’ll call for something to drink.”

He slumped into the chair, his elbows on his knees, his head bowed, while hatred for his father boiled up in a cloud of black, greasy smoke. He gasped as it nearly suffocated him, dimly aware of voices and movement around him.

Then someone put a glass in his hand and wrapped his fingers around it. He grasped the glass and pulled himself out of the choking haze. Allie knelt beside him, her hand on his thigh, her red hair streaming over one shoulder like a cheerful banner.

“It’s brandy,” she said.

“That bastard,” he said, lifting the glass and swallowing the entire contents in one gulp. It scorched down his throat. “That cruel bastard.”

Allie stroked his cheek. “It seems horrible, but maybe he had a reason for what he did.”

“A reason for making a child believe his mother didn’t give a damn about him?” The dark void of abandonment yawned inside Gavin. He twined his fingers into the bright rope of Allie’s hair and held on while the old, familiar sense of being so worthless that his mother had walked away without a backward glance welled up and tried to crush him into nothingness.

“Don’t think about him.” Allie’s voice came from miles away, but he followed it. “Think about your mother, who sent you all these cards. Who never stopped, even though she got no response.”

He reached for her words, clutching at them and hauling himself out of the yawning hole inside his soul.

“Gavin?” Allie was there, her eyes lit with something that calmed him. “She cared about you. Always.”

He shoved the glass onto the desk and reached for the bag, fumbling at the stubborn ziplock fastening.

“Let me.” Allie inserted her fingernail between the plastic edges and peeled the baggie open, sliding the rainbow of brilliant envelopes onto the leather desktop. Gavin scooped up the top one.

The postmark date was a week before his tenth birthday—the year she left—and the location was somewhere in California. There was no return address. The envelope had been opened. He sat with the card in his hand, staring at the ragged edge of the torn flap and trying to force himself to pull the card out.

He was grateful for the slight weight of Allie’s hand on his shoulder, the stir of her breath in his hair, the warmth from her body beside him. He slipped the card out of its gaudy covering. “YOU’RE 10!” it exclaimed in large letters above an excited puppy. As he flipped it open, a folded five-dollar bill fluttered onto his lap.

A gift from his mother.

He touched it with his fingertip, as though it would disintegrate like a dried butterfly’s wing if he put any pressure on it.

Allie squeezed his shoulder. “My grandma used to give me five dollars for my birthday when I was a kid. It was one of my favorite presents because I could buy myself a book with it.”

“My father didn’t even give the money to me,” Gavin said. “He could have claimed it was from some other relative. Or from him.” Gavin might have bought a book, too, or the fancy silver roller-ball pen he’d coveted in the town’s five-and-dime store.

Suddenly, he couldn’t get the card open fast enough. “Dear Gavin.” His mother’s writing flowed across the top, above the printed verse. Below it she’d written:

Double digits! You’re so grown-up now. Don’t put this in your piggy bank! It’s celebration money, which means it must be spent on you. I wish I could help you blow out all those candles. It will look like a bonfire because you’re such a big boy. I love you, lightning bug, and don’t you ever forget it.