Page 39 of Gave Proof Through the Night

“Okay, but that’s not insanity,” Ivy says. “That’s once a month like clockwork for me.”

“Me too,” Tanya agrees.

“Have you guys seen those lists?” Zoe says. “Reasons women got committed to asylums in the old days.“ She pulls up an image on her phone that looks like it’s from a vintage booklet and starts to read some of them. "‘Feebleness of intellect.’"

“Relatable,” Rue says, immediately.

“‘Female disease.’”

I raise my hand “Guilty.”

Zoe goes on. “‘Reading novels.’”

Ginger snorts. “That’s one point against me.”

“‘Imaginary female trouble.’”

“Imaginary?” Tanya repeats.

"‘Laziness,’” Zoe finishes, and drops the phone into her lap like a mic.

Rue, flat on her back on the counter now, stares at the ceiling. “Well. I’m cooked. Commit me now.”

“Half the people in this room would’ve been committed by Wednesday,” Tanya says.

“Honestly,” Ivy says. “Most of history can probably be explained by the fact that all the big decisions got made by nineteen-year-old men who had wine for breakfast.”

“That tracks,” Suri says, and digs into a bag of marshmallows Rue was previously hiding with her body.

“This is the best tangent,” I say, feeling the room lean fully into a conversation that could, left unsupervised, eat the rest of the night. “And we are absolutely finishing it later, but I need to land the plane.”

I swipe to the next image. A slightly younger woman, sharp-jawed, severe traveling clothes that look like a hundred degrees underneath.

“After Mary was released, she spent four years in France. Her traveling companion was a woman named Eleanor Armitage, from a prominent Lexington, Kentucky family.”

I let it sit half a beat.

“My five-times great grandmother.”

“Shut up,” Rue says.

“While they were in France, Mary gave Eleanor the necklace outright. Partly out of defiance, if you ask me. Her own son had just locked her up thinking his mother couldn’t be trusted with her own jewelry box, and Mary was not about to let that necklace anywhere near his well-lawyered hands. But mostly it was love for the one person who’d spent four years treating her like a friend. There are letters that prove it. Mary’s, and Eleanor’s own diary. Together they show it wasn’t stolen or smuggled. It was given, on purpose, to spite Mary’s son.”

“So… it’s your birthright,” Ginger says slowly. “The necklace actually belongs to you.”

“It should,” I say. “In the 1950s, a lending company seized the entire Armitage estate to settle a debt that never actually existed. Land, furniture, jewelry, all of it. The necklace wasn’t even named in their paperwork. It wasn’t accounted for. It just went out the back door with the rest of the estate and stopped existing on paper entirely.”

I swipe again, and a newspaper clipping appears with the headline, “History’s Lost Jewels.” “It doesn’t resurface until it turns up at the Bellenden Museum of American History in the early seventies. It was donated anonymously. Nobody’s ever explained where it was, or who had it, in between.”

The room goes quiet.

“So why donate it?” Tanya asks. “When whoever took it could have sold it?”

“Because they couldn’t find a buyer,” Ginger supplies.

“Exactly,” Zoe chirps. “And somewhere in those twenty blank years, somebody decided the cleanest story was that Eleanor stole it herself.”

Ivy lets out a long breath. “Well, I’ll be.”