“Are you home?” I said.
“Always for you,” he said.
He met me at the door.
He had two glasses of red wine and a plate of olives.
He had the kind of face you can tell hard things to.
He always has.
I told him.
I told him about the wooden box and the letter and the will and the cottage and the bonds and Owen Sloan and the lab in Atlanta and the three hairs from Caroline’s sweater.
I told him that my grandmother had known and my father had known and I had been the unphotographed daughter for 28 years because my mother had a secret that my grandmother had refused to let her bury me to hide.
I told him about the empty album that my mother was planning.
I told him I had overheard, the week before, through a church woman at St. John’s named Cordelia Mailor, that my mother had been openly bragging at coffee hour that she was making me a little wedding lesson.
“She’ll laugh, but she’ll learn.”
I told Theo that I was going to let my mother give me the empty album in front of everyone.
On my wedding day, I told him, I was going to open the back cover in front of all of them and let everything fall out.
He listened.
He did not interrupt.
When I was done, he set his wineglass on the kitchen island.
He turned his stool to face me.
He said, “Petra, do you want to marry me on that day?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to do this on that day?”
“Yes.”
“Then we do both.”
I started to cry finally.
Not for my mother.
Not for my grandmother.
Not for the child in the 14 photographs.
For him.
He held me for a long time.
He did not give me a speech.
He never gives me speeches.
After a while, he said, “We don’t tell the planner. We don’t tell my parents. We don’t tell anyone. We just do it. And the day after, we go to Tybee, and you and I open the cottage, the one your grandmother kept.”
I nodded into his shoulder.
He said, “Petra, promise me one thing.”
“Yes.”
“You let me stand beside you when you open that cover. You don’t open it alone.”
I promised.
That summer, I built it.
I built the binder of evidence the way I built every album in my lab.
Slowly.
With the right paper.
With the right glue.
With archival sleeves and tabs.
I made two duplicates of the will in a fireproof safe at Owen Sloan’s office.
I made one duplicate of the DNA report, sealed in a flat manila envelope, witnessed by Owen and his parallegal.
I made a clean print of all 14 photographs on archival cotton stock.
The originals stayed at my lab in the locked drawer.
I copied my grandmother’s letter onto archival paper, but I also kept the original.
The original would travel with me to the wedding.
I called Caroline’s birth-records office in Buffert County, posing as a parallegal, verifying a probate detail.
They emailed me the abstract within 4 hours.
Caroline’s birth had been registered 6 weeks after the date my mother had always said.
The hospital line on the certificate was not Memorial Health in Savannah, where the rest of us had been born.
It was blank.
The location of birth read: Home, Bowfort County, South Carolina.
Address withheld.
I printed that, too.
In July, I went to Owen Sloan’s office on a Tuesday afternoon, and we sat at his conference table and laid the whole thing out like a curator hanging a show.
The will.
The DNA.
The birth registration.
The 14 photographs.
Owen looked up at me from his legal pad.
He said, “Petra, may I be blunt with you, please? This is one of the cleanest fraudulent-concealment cases I will see in my career. We will recover the cottage. We will recover the bonds. We will recover damages. The county probate court will move on this within 60 days of filing. I can have the petition drafted and sealed by Labor Day.”
“Good,” I said. “File it on the Friday before the wedding.”
He raised one eyebrow.
I said, “She wants an audience for what she’s planning to do to me. I am going to give her exactly the audience she chose.”
Owen Sloan wrote that down in his legal pad.
He said, “I will be at the wedding as a friend of the family, on Theo’s side of the guest list.”
I said, “Thank you.”
Chapter 8: The wedding prep
The binder my mother used for the wedding albums was a small letterpress shop on Drayton Street called Low Country Bound.
They specialized in custom leatherwork.
The owner, a man named Foster Boon, had bound stationery for half of Savannah for 30 years.
My mother had ordered two albums in matching oxblood leather, with our family crest stamped in gold on the spine.
She had paid extra to have her own gold-foiled label stamped on the inside cover.
Caroline’s read: A life full of memories for our Caroline.
Mine read: For Petra, a fresh start.
I learned this in early September because my mother, who could never quite resist showing me her own cruelty in advance, sent me a text message.
“Just stopped at Low Country Bound. The labels turned out perfect. Caroline cried when I showed her hers.”
“So thoughtful,” I replied.
I screenshotted it.
I called Foster Boon.
“Mr. Boon, this is Petra Witam, Beatatric Whitam’s older daughter. I believe my mother commissioned two albums from you for my wedding.”
“Yes, ma’am. They’ve been finished for 2 weeks. Your mother is picking them up the morning of the wedding.”
“Mr. Boon, this is going to sound a little odd. Would you be willing to let me come in and inspect them? I am, as you may know, a photo conservator at the Telair. I would like to verify the integrity of the binding before they’re given as gifts. Discreetly. My mother does not need to know.”