“I don’t know who you’re marrying or what kind of person they turned out to be, but I hope they know how much trouble you were even as a baby, screaming through your first bath like it was a personal insult. I hope they’re patient with you the way I had to learn to be. I won’t get to walk you down anything, so I asked Nurse Agatha to hold onto this until the biggest day she could think of, because she promised me — and she doesn’t break promises, believe me, I tested that theory constantly — that she’d find you eventually, however long it took. Happy wedding day, little sister. I was always going to be there, one way or another.”
The room dissolved into quiet, punctuated only by Odalys’s held-back sob and the sound of a car horn outside that nobody moved to acknowledge.
“Who is Nurse Agatha?” Wren asked, wiping her face hard enough to smudge the careful makeup Odalys had spent an hour perfecting.
I searched my memory and found her instantly — a soft-spoken night nurse on the pediatric transplant floor who used to sneak Desmond extra pudding cups and always remembered which patients liked their blankets a certain way. I hadn’t thought of her name in over a decade.
Before I could answer, the doorbell rang, an oddly formal sound against the chaos of a house already running late for a wedding.
Priscilla startled. Odalys looked toward the hall. Wren clutched the letter to her chest like it might blow away.
“Stay here,” I told them, though my legs felt borrowed as I crossed toward the door.
***
The woman on the porch was older than I remembered — gray now, where she’d once had dark hair pinned severely back, a lavender cardigan replacing the pale scrubs I associated with her — but her eyes hadn’t changed. Agatha Voss’s eyes.
I gripped the doorframe hard enough to feel it in my knuckles.
“Please,” she said, before I could speak. “I know I have no right to interrupt today of all days. Five minutes. That’s all I need.”
I stepped out onto the porch, easing the door shut behind me. Wren couldn’t hear this yet. Not until I understood it myself.
“You,” I said. “You kept it. All this time?”
