Page 204

"I'm not going to say anything bad about your mother," Maria said. "I don't know her. I'm sure she loved you. I'm sure she still does, even if she is a stubborn lady." She squeezed my hands. "But I want you to know this, Harper. I've got a drawer upstairs with my daughter's baby teeth in it, and a stranger's handkerchief, and every newspaper clipping since she was twelve years old. And Thursday, I went to the store and bought a new drawer organizer. Because I'm going to need room."

I didn't understand at first.

Then I did.

"For you," Maria said. "For your clippings. For the photos. For whatever you two give me. I'm going to need room." She smiled at me, and her eyes were wet, and they were Cam's eyes exactly. "So you're going to have to come back. A lot. I already bought the organizer. It wasn't cheap."

I put the espresso down very carefully on the table.

Then I put my face in my hands, and I cried in Maria Russo's kitchen. She came around the table and held me against her apron the way my own mother used to on Sunday nights, sitting on a pillow between her knees, getting my hair done before church.

She didn't tell me to stop. She just stroked my back and murmured in Italian, words I didn't understand but didn't need to.

When I finally lifted my head, Cam was crouched beside my chair. She'd put the plates down somewhere. She was holding my free hand, and her eyes were wet too.

Gianna was crying into a dish towel by the sink.

"We are," Gianna said, sniffing, "the most emotionally unstable family in the entire state of Rhode Island."

"Rhode Island's not that big, Gi," Marco called from the living room.

"Then we're concentrated!" Gianna shouted back.

That night, Cam and I slept in her childhood bedroom.

I need you to understand what this room was. It was the bedroom of a teenage girl who had been the best high school basketball player in the state of Rhode Island and had never once let herself want anything else. There was a full-size bed with a navy comforter. There were trophies on every flat surface. There was a poster of a WNBA legend over the desk and a framed newspaper clipping from her state championship next to it and a pair of high school sneakers nailed to the wall above the door, signed by the entire team.

There was no evidence, anywhere, that the girl who'd lived here had ever had a single feeling about anything except basketball.

"This is so sad," I said, from the middle of the room. "This is the saddest bedroom I've ever seen. This is a bedroom for a Victorian orphan who plays point guard."

"Thank you," Cam said, closing the door. "That's very kind."

"Where's your Avril Lavigne poster? Where's your diary? Where's your secret box of photos of the girl in your chemistry class?"

"I didn't have a secret box."

"You had a secret stash. Everyone has a secret stash."

"I had a secret," Cam said, very quietly. "I just didn't keep it in a box. I kept it everywhere."

I stopped teasing.

I looked at her, standing by the door of the room where she'd spent her whole adolescence locking it all away, and my chest went tight.

Then I noticed the bed. Specifically, I noticed the pillow. The pillowcase of one of the bed's two pillows was satin. Pale gold. Brand new. Still with the fold creases in it from the package.

I walked over and touched it. Then I turned around.

"Cam."

"Yeah."

"Did you tell your mother I needed a satin pillowcase?"

Cam looked at the pillowcase. Then at me. Then at her feet. Then, after a long, long pause, at the ceiling.

"I might have mentioned," she said, "that you sleep in a bonnet. And that cotton is bad for your hair. In passing."