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I have missed Coleman Cooper every damned day of my life. And now that Marshall has treated me so cruelly, I am doubly aware of the terrible calculation I made that night.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

As Cam and Francine finished reading the diary entry, Tiny came up to them from behind the bar with two shot glasses of bourbon. He pushed them across the scuffed counter with his baseball mitt–sized hands. “On the house,” he said. “I figured you could use it. Looks like you just got sad news. I’m real sorry.”

Cam looked at Francine and realized they both had tears streaming down their cheeks.

Cam swirled the glass of amber liquid, her head swimming like the whiskey inside. “On one hand, I’m thrilled for Ada. She’s going to get the credit she deserves for Stormy, and that feels like a major wrong righted,” she said. “We should be doing celebration shots! But I can’t get over the sad story about Coleman. I mean, imagine what it was like for her, living with that kind of regret.”

“I wonder what happened to Coleman,” Francine said, wiping a cheek with her sleeve. “Still, this is a big moment. Just think—they’ll probably publish the sequel. Wait, who gets the money from that?”

“The Historical Society does,” Cam said. “They were the beneficiary of Marshall’s estate, so any royalties or other money from the books goes to them, whether they were written by Ada or Marshall.” Cam was already planning to call Russell as soon as she got home. Her agent might have a ballpark idea of what the second book might get from a publisher. And then there was the matter of presenting the whole thing to the Historical Society. Birdie would relish being in charge of convening a special meeting.

“To Ada?” Francine lifted her glass.

“To Ada,” Cam responded, and the women clinked glasses and downed the fiery liquid.

After Cam delivered the good news, Birdie was only too pleased to call a meeting of the board—which consisted of herself, Marcus, Miles, Roxy, and two others Cam didn’t know, a history professor at the community college and the editor of the Silver Cove Weekly—for the following evening.

“And you haven’t breathed a word of this to Marcus, have you?” Cam asked.

“No, and he’ll be in an absolute lather when I tell him there’s going to be a meeting but won’t tell him what it’s about,” Birdie cackled. “The man hates not knowing something. For once, I’ve got the upper hand in the gossip department over Marcus Bloodsworth, and believe you me, I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.”

Cam left her grandmother to make the calls, sprawling out across the twin bed upstairs while she called Russell. She reached her agent in a flash. Russell might have been one of the busiest men in all of Manhattan but he wasn’t the let-it-go-to-voicemail type. Cam told him all about Ada and the manuscript and Sotheby’s authentication. And the cookbook, too. She gave him the outline of the stories Ada had written in her diary, about Marshall’s betrayal and her forbidden love and the elopement-that-almost-was with Coleman. Russell listened, asked a few pointed questions, and then he fell silent.

“Hello?” Cam asked. “Are you still there? I thought maybe we had a bad connection.” Russell Paxton was not the lost-for-words type, either.

“Cam,” he said, “I don’t mean to be dramatic, but this could be huge—massive. Stormy of Silver Cove might not be a hot seller now. But with this story? With the right PR push, I think it could do gangbusters. A reissue of Stormy, then the sequel, maybe the cookbook, too. And the rights to Ada’s life story? Every production company in Hollywood is going to be drooling over it.”

Cam grinned. She had been so concerned with the task of proving Ada’s authorship out of principle that she hadn’t really thought through how big a deal it might be out there in the wide world—and then there was an unexpected sequel on top of it all. She had known, of course, that she would be setting the public record straight and giving Ada her due. But from the sound of it, this was something else altogether. If Russell played the cards right, and Cam knew he could, Ada would be a bona fide celebrity. She would have loved that.

“Is there any chance you want this dead client badly enough that you could make it to Silver Cove by tomorrow night at six?” she asked. “There’s a meeting you might want to attend.”

“Clearing my schedule as we speak,” he replied.

After she hung up with Russell, Cam stayed where she was, draped across the lumpy bed in the attic room with Parsley nuzzled up under her arm. Soon it would be time for her to leave this little nest, just like she had at the end of summers with Birdie, and go back to her real life. She couldn’t stay on a rickety twin bed under her grandmother’s eaves forever. The house repairs would soon be finished. And her mission with Ada was all but done. She could work from New York on her cookbook with Izzy. (She had been careful, even in her mind, to stop calling it Izzy’s cookbook because it was both of theirs now.)

But as Cam contemplated packing up and driving home to Brooklyn, she thought about all the ways she had changed since she left, and she wasn’t sure the quiet apartment in that big, bustling city—and the solitary life she had so long treasured—was where she belonged anymore.

Later that night, Cam was pouring milk over breadcrumbs for meat loaf for dinner with Birdie. She had been surprised at herself that afternoon at the Pack ’N’ Save when she had pulled the package of ground beef from the refrigerator case without even realizing what she was doing. She never made meat loaf. Mostly because it reminded her of Flora. And maybe, Cam thought as she seasoned the breadcrumbs with a generous pinch of coarse salt and cracked pepper, that’s just what she had wanted to do tonight.

As she added the meat and dug in with her hands, squishing the beef into the breadcrumbs, Cam was suddenly fifteen and in the dingy, laminate-countered Sante Fe apartment she and Flora had been living in. She would be sixteen in three months, and her mother would be found dead on the side of Route 25 just a few miles away. But that morning, Flora had said she would be home for dinner, and they would order Chinese and watch a movie. It was rare that her mother would plan a night home with Cam when she wasn’t at the coffee shop singing.

Usually, Flora would attend another band’s show or hang around whatever bar her boyfriend was playing, leaving Cam alone with her books and a frozen pizza. And so Cam had decided that evening—just the two of them—would be perfect. She would make a homemade meal, and Flora would be so impressed.

Cam had walked the half mile to the little grocery and used the money she had saved to buy the ingredients for the dinner with recipes she had clipped from a ladies’ magazine that had been left behind in their rental apartment. Cam had loved the photo that went with them: a happy family of a mom and a dad and two kids, a boy and a girl, all sitting down to meat loaf and potatoes.

Fifteen-year-old Cam had never cooked before, not really. But that night, she followed every direction, stirring the package of seasonings into the meat and slicking the outside of the loaf with ketchup, and boiling the potatoes and mashing them with butter. It came out smelling homey and warm, and she put it all out on Pyrex plates on the faux-wood table that didn’t really look like the one in the magazine. But it was close enough, Cam had thought as she folded the paper napkins and placed them under their forks.

And then Flora never showed up. Cam had waited, and waited, until the food had all gone cold. She was hungry, but she couldn’t bring herself to eat, and as the darkness deepened outside, she had wrapped it all in plastic and gone to bed, not even bothering to keep an ear out—as she usually did—for the sound of Flora’s key in the lock.

For so long, Cam had held on to that memory with such bitterness. She had seen herself for the sad, lonely girl she was and had felt such anger toward her mother. But as she stood in Birdie’s kitchen, she saw it in a new light, as if she were watching a show from a different seat. In that story, there wasn’t just disappointment. There was love, too. She had adored her mother, and she wanted to make her happy. Flora wasn’t a good mother, it was true. But she had loved Cam back.

And Cam suddenly remembered the other part of the story, the one where fifteen-year-old Cam had woken up the next morning and went into the kitchen to find Flora, who had warmed up the leftovers and spread them out on the table again. She had draped a sheet over the table as a tablecloth and put a vase of flowers she had picked from the neighbor’s garden in the center. It was even more beautiful than the magazine picture. And her mother was sitting there, in her silky Chinese robe, her straw-gold hair a mess, looking delighted.

“Oh, my perfect Camillia,” she had said, drawing Cam into her arms and kissing her head. “This is the greatest dinner-for-breakfast I have ever seen.” And then she had laughed that silvery laugh that no one was able to resist, and the two of them dug in and ate nearly every crumb, and Cam had never felt so full or happy.

Maybe, Cam thought as she brushed the meat loaf with a balsamic glaze, it was time to let go of her resentment of Flora, to stop framing every choice she made as an epic game of “what would Flora do?” and then choosing the opposite. In a funny way, that night so long ago in Santa Fe, Flora had given her the gift of cooking, something Cam nurtured for the rest of her life and made her who she was, of understanding that if you poured your heart into a dish, the person making it could taste it. And that just the act of creating something delicious was important in its own way, no matter what happened. That was Flora’s real legacy, Cam realized, her gift to her daughter.