Page 2 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

Chapter One

Eighteen Months Later

Thanksgiving was Veronica’s favorite holiday.

She loved the pure extravagance of food, the little family traditions built over the years—like the fresh strawberry- and blueberry-infused sparkling water that her youngest, Ben, had invented when he was six, and the banoffee pie Spence had discovered on an academic trip to England.

Veronica practiced it until he swooned. Her own favorite dish was a yam casserole baked with mini marshmallows, the only recipe she really had from her mother.

When her kids were small, they’d loved that dish more than anything.

Today, it sat forlornly on the table with only one serving removed. Hers.

The orange casserole was served in a glass dish she’d rescued from an antique shop, and the dishes were a set of china she’d collected over time.

It was an antique pattern with lacy edges and delicate roses, called Chateau Dresden.

She’d found a saucer, bowl, and teacup at a thrift store when she was an undergrad, one of the most beautiful things she’d ever owned, and made a vow to herself then to have a life that included a full set.

And so she had. Had being the operative word.

She had especially loved her dining room, a broad space with wide pine-plank floors and a row of leaded-glass windows looking out toward her side garden.

It had been beautiful even in deep autumn in Boulder because she’d planted things that had interesting dry leaves and colored stems to duplicate themselves in the edges of the leaded glass.

The walls of the dining room were painted light green, with William Morris wallpaper in a wide border above the wainscoting.

Below a 1920s chandelier with rare green carnival glass sat a big table they’d found at auction long before “farmhouse” became a named decorating style.

The china she had collected one piece at a time looked splendid on that table.

The most beautiful room in the world, she thought, when her family and friends were arranged around the bountiful food she’d prepared for them.

It could be a Dutch painting, with bowls of steaming carrots and the gleaming bird and bread in a basket, everyone lit just so by that bank of north-facing windows.

It was even more delectable when everyone went home or into their own spaces, leaving her to her beautiful home, each room a creation from her very soul. Home.

Her space no longer.

Today, in her much smaller apartment kitchen, she’d prepared the turkey—which was not an easy bird to make delicious—and fresh cranberry sauce with orange zest and walnuts.

She’d made her daughter’s beloved stuffed celery and the apple upside-down cake her youngest son loved.

Now that he’d gone vegan, she had to alter the recipe, but she was quite proud of the adaptation.

It had turned out so perfectly that she took a photo.

She’d set the much smaller table in her apartment and had created a playlist of favorites to cast a background to their meal and, frankly, offset the quiet. Even with all the effort, it felt a little hollow, an imitation Thanksgiving.

They did their best. They ate and laughed and joked. It was as she stood up to clear and picked up the sweet potatoes that Jenna said, “Mom, maybe it’s time to let the old-school sweet potatoes go.”

“I can see none of you like it now,” she said. Some small, barely audible voice said, But I do!

Tim snickered. “That’s because it was popular in 1959, boomer.”

“I’m not a boomer!”

“Close enough,” he said.

For some reason, it stung, the teasing that made her feel outdated. “I’m Gen X, and you know it.”

She began to clear the rest of the table, Jenna and Ben standing up to help.

Balance had only very recently been restored to the family. She let it go, piling dishes on the minuscule strip of counter.

Jenna paused by an enormous Boston fern thriving next to a window. It was a thirty-year-old plant, one of the few things she’d dragged with her from her old home.

“I don’t get how to make ferns thrive like this,” Jenna said. “I’ve watched a million things on TikTok, but nothing seems to work.”

“Maybe try watering it less,” Veronica suggested. “People tend to overwater more than underwater.”

“Okay, boomer,” Tim said. It was clear he was joking, but it landed wrong.

“Quit that! I just told you I’m not a boomer.”

He grinned, looking so much like his father at the same age that he could have skied right off the slopes into her apartment. “Close enough.”

She shook her head. “Never mind. Who wants dessert and coffee?”

They all glanced at each other, then Jenna spoke for all of them. “Um ... we’re going to go to Dad’s for dessert. It seemed only fair.”

“Fair.” Tears stung her eyes, but she refused to let them see. “Ah.” She crossed her arms, feeling the familiar pinch—the unfairness of having lost everything to—

“Mom, don’t be mad,” Tim said. “We ate the meal here, with you.”

“I’m not mad,” she said, sliding silverware into a pot of water, but a pulse at the base of her throat felt as if it would tear open her skin.

For a moment, it was a satisfying image, the artery exploding from her neck, spilling the blood of her wound down the front of her well-tended—though now-ancient—cashmere sweater.

Three sets of blue eyes watched her, filled with worry and, if she were honest, the need to escape the discomfort.

All at once she was sick to death of feeling like a victim, of everyone feeling sorry for her, looking at her with pity or slight embarrassment. A wild impulse swelled through her. “Don’t worry about it.” She blurted out a lie: “I’m going to India, so I have some things to plan.”

“India!” Jenna cried. “When?”

“I haven’t nailed down the dates.”

“You can’t go to India. By yourself?” Ben said. Her baby, the one for whom she’d made a vegan apple upside-down cake that would now go uneaten. It seemed ridiculous that she’d thought it such an important task. A cake!

“Of course I can,” she said. “I’m not feeble.”

“You’re kind of old, though.”

“Well, hardly. I’m fifty, which is not as young as Fiona,” she retorted, and instantly regretted it. Fiona was her ex-husband’s new wife, ripely pregnant and juicy at the age of thirty-two, the cliché of all time, and Veronica burned with the agony of it.

At least Fiona, unlike Veronica, had completed her master’s degree before embarking on the affair that had led to marrying her professor husband.

Today, Fiona would be serving dessert in that beloved now-lost dining room, cleaning up in that oceanic kitchen.

The thoughts were arrows, sticking in various organs—lungs, liver, kidneys.

Her children looked at her with pity, all three pairs of eyes the same clear blue as her own, their mouths and cheekbones belonging to their father.

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Go. Enjoy dessert.” She ripped a piece of foil from the roll and covered the cake.

“Might as well take this. You know she only cooks Sara Lee.”

Jenna snorted in appreciation. Ben grabbed the cake. “Love you,” he said before kissing her cheek.

Tim, too, bent to give her a hug. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” he said. “You’re just so easy to tease.”

“I know,” she said.

It wasn’t until they left and she was standing in the middle of her kitchen, emptiness below the Louis Armstrong playing, that she realized what she’d said.

India? Where had that come from? Obviously, it was ridiculous—she was struggling to make rent, much less afford a trip to the other side of the world. Eventually she’d have to admit her lie. It humiliated her that they’d know she’d made it up.

But not today.

That evening, she sat in the cold, tiny second bedroom at her desk and watched the snow falling. It was a magical scene, flakes sparkling through the bar of someone’s porch light. A girlhood in northern New Mexico had given snow almost mystical properties, and she loved it every single time.

It was quiet. So quiet. That was the thing about the apartment that bugged her the most. She’d prepared for an empty nest—as much as was possible, anyway—by taking on a new volunteer position at the tiny gold rush history museum.

She’d already had her garden club and the part-time position at the nonprofit.

But just as the kids launched—Tim off to graduate school in Chicago; Jenna starting her junior year at the University of Colorado, where her dad taught philosophy; and Ben starting his freshman year at Stanford—the world closed down for COVID.

Lacking resources on their various campuses, the kids all drove home, and the family sheltered together.

Veronica loved it. It was an unexpected reprieve, having everyone under the same roof for over a year, the kids enrolled remotely in classes.

She’d hear one professor lecturing on Shakespeare, another on some math formula that was over her head.

In his own den/office, Spence held forth on Socrates and Marcus Aurelius and the reliability of logic.

Ruler of the house again, Veronica happily made vats of soup, baked sourdough bread, and served meals every night in their cozy dining room.

Then, over the course of eight months, her world shattered. The kids went back to their various apartments and dorms.

But then her marriage abruptly—or it seemed like it at the time—fell apart. Her husky mutt, Sophie, had died at fifteen. She had to move out of the house she adored.

Veronica had not been the slightest bit silent or docile or dignified about that, much to her embarrassment now. Among other things, there had been one memorable night she had called him twenty-seven times after drinking a bottle of rosé.

She had prepared for the loss of her beloved dog, as much as a person could. She had prepared for her children to leave home. She had even been looking forward to the next chapter of her life with a certain amount of anticipation.

The loss of her marriage had blindsided her.

Everyone said that wasn’t possible, that she must have known on some level, but she hadn’t.

One day she’d thought she was happily married, and the next, she was the unwanted wife.

He sobbed when he told her that he’d fallen in love with a visiting professor.

An Irish poet as ethereal as a Maxfield Parrish painting.

Spence was so sorry, but he had to end the marriage. Immediately.

Not that Veronica gave in, just like that. Oh, no.

She believed in their marriage, the union other people envied. How could they have such great sex (twice a week!) if they weren’t still very attracted to each other?

But in the end, she lost him. He was in love with someone else.

Because the house had been handed down through his family like some medieval manor, not to mention she couldn’t afford the upkeep of a hundred-year-old house, she’d had to give up her beloved house and garden to move to this apartment, where the only voice was her own.

Now she didn’t just have an empty nest; she had no nest. It was just an apartment in an old house without even a pet to keep her company.

The only noises were noises she made—clattering dishes or singing against the dark.

Sitting here in the cold of a Thanksgiving night that should have been spent around the raucous noise of board games with her family, it was so quiet she could hear the creaks of the old floorboards.

The all-too-familiar waves of fury and grief rose like magma through her body, but she had cried and screamed enough for twenty women. Irritated, she stood up, snapped on the Bluetooth speaker, and played an upbeat list of favorites.

Do something productive, her therapist’s voice said in her mind. She’d had to quit the expensive sessions a couple of months ago, but that didn’t nullify the help she’d discovered.

Instead of scrolling through Facebook, she clicked on LinkedIn to look for a job.

Her alimony was meager because even a full professor didn’t make a huge sum of money, and he did have a second family on the way, along with three kids still in college.

She had to find something soon, and preferably not secretarial.

Not that there was anything wrong with the work, but it had never been something she could bear. It literally made her fall asleep.

She liked being active. Maybe something outside.

It wasn’t like she had many credentials in any field.

Good education, but no experience in anything except raising children and grant writing.

She’d done a lot of grant writing for various nonprofits over the years and was good at it.

She hoped there might be a position for her somewhere in one of the many nonprofits in town, but she had not had much luck so far.

A person could find work, she told herself. She would. She scrolled down and stopped, electrified.

Seeking female companion to assist with travel and research.

History major preferred, must be able to lift 40 lbs.

, walk for several hours in any weather and climb steps.

Three to four weeks, itinerary including London, Paris, Morocco, India.

Fluent French preferred, other language experience a plus.

Salary dependent upon experience. Contact [email protected].

For a minute, she stared at the entry as if she might have imagined it. How could this even be a real job offer? The cadence of the destinations sang through her—London, Paris, Morocco, India.

India. As if she’d conjured it.

Fierce, hot want suddenly awakened in her chest. It was such a strange sensation that she had to press a hand to her sternum. Her heart thudded beneath her palm, and the music of place-names sang through her body. London, Paris, Morocco, India!

Her heart raced, and she told herself to calm down.

It was probably some weird scam. And even if it was real, she probably wouldn’t qualify.

But she was fluent in French, though it was rusty, and she’d graduated with degrees in history and women’s studies, and she could certainly walk several hours and lift forty pounds. It couldn’t hurt to try.

If bad luck could fall on a person all at once, maybe good luck could, too.

Without a second’s hesitation, she sent an email.