Chapter Forty-One
Boston, Massachusetts
Cora stood in front of the stone mansion facade of the Dolores Bastion museum.
Banners unfurled in the wind, heralding the return of the lost Rembrandt.
She took a deep breath. She was dressed in a new navy suit that was almost black.
She wore white gloves, a cloche hat, and red lipstick in a shade that reminded her of Dina, always staining her lips on the Pelican ferry.
Cora clutched a smart purse in her gloved hands and walked confidently in pumps she had purchased with Mabel’s money, sidestepping a piece of gum.
The museum inside was cool stone, and her heels echoed across the tile floor.
She purchased a ticket and wandered through the small pockets of crowds toward the open-air courtyard.
Sunlight filtered from the third-story glass atrium to fall on violet lacecap hydrangea and golden oncidium orchids.
She leaned against one of the stonework arches and closed her eyes.
She knew hope always played the long game, but she hadn’t realized how much it could hurt.
Most of the letters she had written to her father had gone unanswered. She had gotten one card in the mail for her birthday. Short, perfunctory: Happy birthday. He didn’t use her name—much less her nickname—but at least he had signed it Da.
Cora dipped into her pocket for her worry stone out of habit before remembering that it was no longer there.
She had posted it in her last letter to him, worn down from years of all her worries and wounds.
But this time, she had planted it like a seed—hoping that someday, if she waited long enough, she might open the mailbox and find the hint of something new growing there.
She was learning herself how much forgiveness could be a gift.
A method of release, in the same way that tears were.
Cora opened her eyes just as Jack stepped out into the mottled sunlight.
He wasn’t dressed in a hundred-dollar tuxedo, his hands cascading a waterfall of cards as he sipped a martini on Enchanted Hill.
He wasn’t in the chambray uniform of Pelican, sifting the dirt and pebbles with his calloused fingers.
He was all the iterations of himself she had ever known, and yet more.
Today he looked relaxed. Handsome. He strolled toward her, hands in his pockets.
He had grown a beard in the weeks since she had last seen him.
She could still faintly see the scar he once had gotten from the Gasper.
Her throat closed. She felt a simple, golden joy well up inside her at the sight of him. And she realized why he looked so different.
It was the first time she had ever seen him free.
“Jack,” she said.
She smiled at him. Her truest friend, on what often felt like little more than a giant, turning rock.
“In a lot of ways, my story started here,” he said quietly. “I came back because I want to rewrite it.”
He hesitated. And then he offered her his hand.
She could look back and see how the relationships in her life either broke like a bone or breathed like a pair of lungs.
The ones that survived had mirrored the symmetry of blood vessels and tree branches—places of exhale, where failings were breathed in and turned into mercy. Like alchemy, her father might say.
Like a miracle, her mother would say.
Cora followed Jack to the third floor, where they stood side by side in a dimly-lit room in front of the Rembrandt. Like they had unknowingly done so many weeks before.
“I want to rewrite it with you,” Cora said. Jack brought her hand to his lips.
She turned to the Lazarus and felt a glimpse of what it must have been like to cross back over the threshold; how the world around him must have sung with new life.
So she would hold out hope that some stories could be remade, even as the mailbox stayed empty and the locusts swarmed.
She had seen for herself what could sometimes still be.
And so she would never stop looking.