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Just then, Cam’s phone buzzed with a text from Avery.

Call me!!! it read. Cam held the phone up for Francine to see and called her cousin, putting Avery on speakerphone. There were no other customers at the bar, so Cam didn’t think they would bother anyone.

“Hey, Cam,” Avery answered. “I’m here at Vivian’s lab to sign paperwork and attestations about where we found the manuscript and diary. And I’ve got great news—they’re going to authenticate it. It’s complicated, and I don’t understand how it all works, but the upshot is that they are recognizing Ada as the true author of Stormy of Silver Cove and of the sequel!”

Cam let out a huge sigh, and Francine squealed.

“There has to be a bunch more documentation,” Avery continued, “but they’re going to write a letter to the Historical Society condensing their findings. Vivian says she is willing to speak at a press conference if the society wants to hold one.”

“That’s amazing!” Cam said. Roxy and any other doubters would surely not be able to argue against such authoritative sources.

“And there’s more,” Avery said. “The diary—they opened it here, and it’s incredible. Ada tells the whole story of how Marshall found the first manuscript, which she thought she had mailed to a publisher in New York. He apparently intercepted it before it could be posted and then sent it under his own name. And get this—Ada didn’t even know what he had done until it was published. Can you believe it? She was furious, of course, but there was nothing she could do. So she wrote the cookbook, which she thought she might be able to publish, since there was no way Marshall was going to take credit for a bunch of recipes. And you were right, the letters were clues! And then she wrote the sequel in secret, again hoping to someday prove herself. She only started writing the diary after the manuscript was stolen as an outlet.”

“Oh my God,” Cam said. Over the last weeks, she had imagined all the ways Marshall’s betrayal of his wife might have played out. But finding out how he had done it was another thing altogether. It was real and visceral, and Cam could practically feel Ada’s devastation at finding out her book had been published—but under her husband’s name!

“And there’s another diary entry I think you are going to want to read,” Avery said. “There is much more to Ada’s story than we thought. I’ll shoot you the file that they captured here.” Avery said her goodbyes, and Cam’s phone buzzed again with the attachment her cousin had promised. As the jukebox twanged with Dolly Parton singing “Winter Wonderland,” Cam and Francine huddled around Cam’s phone and began scrolling.

CHAPTER THIRTY

ADA’S DIARY

September 28, 1926

Dearest Diary,

Darling, you will be pleased to hear I have managed to avoid giving in to the fits of white-hot rage that so often take over my mind—and sometimes, I fear, my body. Seeing my book, the product of my heart and my pen—a book that truly felt like a friend to me as I endured these lonely times with a distant husband—in someone else’s name at first felt like a stab wound.

And to imagine that Marshall would change my words so that sweet, brave Polly was no longer the heroine because he couldn’t stand the idea of a girl being important? Why, I was certain that I would never, never recover from it all. That I might simply up and die of sadness or shrivel into a tiny brown chestnut because I had shed so many tears into my pillow.

But these days, I have become so angry I fear what I might do! Every time I walk by the heavy silver candlesticks that sit on the mantel in the parlor, I imagine picking one up ever so casually and bashing it over Marshall’s head and then fixing myself a drink. And because my imagination does tend to run wild, I picture myself on trial for his murder and the impassioned speech I would make in the courtroom…

Why, I would speak so eloquently of his wrongs against me, the judge would just have to free me on the spot, and then all the newspapers would interview me and put me on their front pages, and I would be a star!

But of course all of this is pure fantasy, and the bitter truth is that I would be locked away or put to the gallows, if such things still exist. The grim fact is that I have to live with this injustice unless I can come up with another way. And what I need to admit to myself, dearest diary, is that this is truly all my own fault.

I have been pouring my broken heart into your pages these last few months, ever since my precious book was taken from me. And it has been such a comfort to have a diary to confide in. Sometimes, though, I like to think someone might read these words someday, when I am gone. Perhaps it will be a granddaughter, although the thought of Marshall touching me is absolutely revolting. But I suppose we must have children somehow, and the prospect of the company of funny, silly children in this dreary house is at least something to look forward to. All of this I say because if my granddaughter ever reads these pages, then I must tell her something I never could in life. It is my most shameful secret and my biggest regret.

I would say to that sweet little girl that she should never make the mistake I made. That if she ever has the chance at true love—the beautiful, shimmering kind of love that makes you giddy and swoony, even though you are so very strong you could stand in the middle of a hurricane and not tip over a bit—she should take it. Please, darling, please take it! No matter the cost because not taking that chance will always cost more.

And so, here is the story I have never told anyone.

When I was a girl, my parents had a cook named Muriel Cooper, who was more like a mama to me than my own. She let me spend hours with her in the kitchen, and she taught me to cook the most wonderful food. Unlike anyone else in my young life, she let me do things, even if it was just peeling sweet potatoes or washing greens. The thrill of accomplishment was something I had never found anywhere else, except maybe in my writing classes at school, and it made me feel almost powerful, which is quite something for a woman in this world, isn’t it? And Mama Cooper taught me how, if you put love and care into the dishes you made, the people you made them for could taste it. That, I decided, was even better than magic.

And then there was her son, Coleman Cooper. Coleman and I knew each other as children. He would turn up at the back kitchen door bearing wire baskets of oysters for my parents’ dinner parties, and he ran errands for his mother, picking up groceries and wood for the fire. We played together, well out of my parents’ eyes. It would have been unseemly, as Mother would have said, for a girl like me to fraternize with the servants’ children. But what she really would have meant was whites and blacks weren’t supposed to mix, not that she would ever say it out loud. Mama Cooper wasn’t too keen on us being friends, either. And so our friendship was a clandestine one. And by the time I was sixteen, I knew I was head over heels in love with Coleman Cooper.

He was smart, although he was mostly self-taught because the black school barely had any books. He used to quote Shakespeare to me and read me poems he had memorized. He was fearless, always the first to jump off a dock into the marsh mud below and to scale the rickety steps of the lighthouse down the shore. And he was the most talented musician I’ve ever heard. He used to play the guitar for me, and he told me that someday he would write a song for me that everyone in the world would hear.

Once, his jazz band played a birthday party I went to at my friend Eliza Wise’s, and it was both marvelous—he and the band played “The Charleston” and I danced until I thought I would die of exhaustion—but also wretchedly terrible because I couldn’t even speak to him there in front of everyone. I dared not even look at him. I had read in the newspapers about lynchings, about boys who had been killed just because they had talked to a white girl.

When I was eighteen and just out of high school, Coleman made a plan that took my breath away. His cousin from Harlem, New York, had taken a steamship to Paris, France, where he was playing trumpet in the house band of a club, making plenty of money backing up visiting performers, including Miss Josephine Baker, who was the toast of the city, known for her scandalous banana dances. American jazz was the rage in Paris, all the papers said so, and Coleman’s cousin said he could find him work playing the clubs of a neighborhood called Montmartre. Coleman wanted for us to marry. I would be a writer, a real writer, and he would be a bandleader. We could be together in Paris, he said. It wasn’t anything like Silver Cove, or even Richmond.

I dreamed of this life so fervently that I could practically see the streetlights along the Champs-Élysées and taste the foods I’d read about—champagne and pastries as light as a feather—and hear the jazz music in the air. I practiced my schoolgirl French.

And Coleman had made it all seem so real, so possible. We hatched a plan, and he saved a little money, enough for us to travel, anyway. We would ride in his friend’s carriage to the train station an hour away, catch the train to New York, and then take a ship to France. We would have to travel separately, of course, but we would be together in Paris.

And here is the part that pains me to think about, let alone write. When it came time to leave, my courage failed me. The night we were supposed to depart, I had my things packed into a small case. I put on my coat and hat and gloves. And I couldn’t leave my room. It was as if I were as frozen as the glaciers I had seen in Daddy’s National Geographic magazines. I’d like to say it was because I was scared for Coleman—if we were ever caught, he would pay the price, not me. But that wasn’t true. I was scared for myself. Scared to leave everything I had ever known. Scared for what might lie ahead. I let my fear paralyze me, and in that moment, I lost everything. Of course, I didn’t quite realize it then. But I just sat there in my coat and hat and gloves and watched the clock on my mantel tick by the minutes.

Coleman left without me. And I never blamed him, not once. There was nothing for him here in Silver Cove. After he left and Daddy arranged for me to marry Marshall, I just went along with everything in a daze. I would ask after Coleman sometimes when I visited Mother and Daddy on Sundays. Mama Cooper said he was doing well, that he had gotten a job at a club and had seen the Eiffel Tower. I suppose he eventually forgot all about me, which might have broken my heart worse than I had broken my own by not leaving with him.