“The audit’s handled,” Julian said, closing the velvet box around my fingers.

“Let’s leave the numbers in the study and focus on our family.”

By four forty-five, Eleanor stood at the polished glass counter of the baby boutique downtown on Elm Street.

She wrote the owner a four-hundred-eighty-dollar deposit check for an imported Swedish convertible stroller.

I walked toward the back wall of the store, where a low wooden shelf held vintage children’s books bound in cloth and leather.

In the middle of the second shelf, a worn hardcover caught my eye.