Secrets Whispered from the Sea - Emma St. Clair Page 0,29

cried quietly over an ugly scrunchie with a few strands of white hair attached to it.

All of those eventually I was able to throw away. The real treasures, I knew, were behind the door at the end of the hall. The one I had freaked out about Alec opening. The one I still couldn’t even crack. But I was making progress. That is, if pressing my cheek to it earlier, my hands splayed open like starfish was anything to go on. Baby steps.

Tomorrow I would open the door. Maybe the next day. Soon.

“What about this?” Emily asked, holding out a floral notebook. “It was in this stack of newspapers.”

The moment it touched my hands, I knew it wasn’t trash. The spirals were thicker than a normal notebook, and they were gold. The flowers on the front weren’t cartoon illustrations but a print of some famous painting I vaguely recognized. It was the kind of thing you’d pick up at Target in the office supply section, or maybe a gift shop.

The middle of the front had a white hexagon, because fancy notebooks couldn’t just have a square. Perfectly preserved inside the white shape was Nana’s handwriting.

A Full Accounting of My Mistakes and Failures.

This was no notebook. It was Nana’s journal. She could have put any number of things in that clean, white, fancy shape, yet this is what she chose. It made my lips twitch. Because I knew Nana and her humor. I could hear her chuckling as she wrote it.

Emily’s voice startled me. “I’m going to head out. I’ll take a load of trash out and a few more boxes. Don’t worry. I’ll have everything perfect for the Crud meeting in two days. You’re coming?”

I wasn’t thinking of Alec’s five o’clock shadow. I wasn’t. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

That night after brushing my teeth, my eyes landed again on Nana’s journal, sitting on the middle of the coffee table. I sank onto the couch, tucking my feet underneath me. Nana’s journal. I couldn’t imagine why it had been in the middle of a stack of magazines and newspapers piled as high as my hip. Did she lose it? Or not care if it got thrown out?

Wasn’t this the kind of thing you kept on your bedside table? And why that name?

I had no illusions that Nana was perfect. The relationship she had with Mom had been rocky, though my mother didn’t seem to have any relationships that weren’t. Nana was passionate. At times, overly opinionated. If there were ever arguments within the Fab Four, Nana somehow managed to be in the center of them. Though whenever she did decide to forgive, she never looked back, moving through her anger and beyond like it was water, clear and easy.

I had assumed that the title was joking about her mistakes and failings … but maybe not. It made me want to tear up thinking of Nana being so hard on herself.

Apparently in the last year, something had shifted for her. She’d begun hoarding. The amount of stuff she’d accumulated during this time was no small thing. At least it wasn’t cats. Or some other kind of animal. But still—what had led to the state of her house?

I knew hoarding could signal deeper issues like anxiety or depression. No one had said anything. Not Ann. Not the rest of the Fab Four, who had mostly left me alone since descending on me the other day for breakfast. Even at the memorial, they’d given me space. They’d promised to school me on bridge before the game or match or whatever this week but had not called.

If I would get any insight to Nana’s last year, it would be inside these pages. I took a breath, opened the floral journal, and began to read.

Hours later, I closed the journal, tears dripping into my wide smile. Hugging it to my chest, I leaned back into the couch cushions. The ceiling fan stirred heat around the room, but in that moment, I didn’t mind.

From what I’d read so far, the journal was filled with humorous and self-deprecating notes. She covered everything from not putting dish soap in the dishwasher to the many incorrect ways of removing sand from the crotch of a bathing suit. There were even a few that I think had to do with weeks that Ann and I had stayed with her. One in particular about not trusting a quiet house when you had small children. Mom had been an only child, so the children