“Almost ready, sweetie,” he said.

Chapter 20 — How to Stay

A year after that, Mabel and Damian were married, in a small, quiet ceremony in the garden behind the house they had rebuilt.

Mrs.

Gable sat in the front row and cried with joy through the whole of it.

And Phoebe Vance came, too — Phoebe, whose relationship with her father was permanently and finally severed, but whose choice to walk into a stranger’s house one rainy Thursday and set down a leather folder had let her build, for the first time in her life, an existence that was not organized around her family’s secrets.