item was removing him. But now it seemed...maudlin.
She walked to the bed and lay down, fully clothed, and stared up at the dark blue canopy above her head. It matched the dark blue draperies. The color, the heaviness of it all, had been Percy’s choice. Hollis would have preferred something lighter and airier.
The chaise before the hearth, on which they’d made love on lazy rainy mornings, was collecting hats and gloves now. There was a desk and a wood-and-leather chair against a wall, and Percy’s Bible was tucked neatly into a corner. Hollis got off the bed and, with her hands on her hips, she looked around the room. It was beginning to look a little drab. She was beginning to look and feel a little drab.
Her heart told her it was time to change. She’d loved Percy with all her heart, but what was the point of clinging to things? It didn’t ease the loss. That had dulled all on its own, no matter how hard she’d tried to cling to his memory. Now, the idea that she’d clung to it for as long as she had made her sad. She was still a living, breathing thing. She was a person in her own right. She was not Percy’s appendage.
It was time she changed this room to reflect her.
Just as she’d changed the gazette. That’s what she’d done when she’d heard her family’s whisper, What to do with Hollis? She’d understood that forging her own path before one could be forged for her was the challenge, but it was one she had to accept. She would be forever grateful to herself for it, too. The good Lord knew it would have been so easy to let her father and Eliza determine what was best for her. It would have been so easy to listen to Caroline and Beck tell her what she needed to do.
It hadn’t been easy to refuse their offers of help, especially when she’d had to force herself to go through Percy’s office and open his drawers and read his notes and see what he’d left behind of himself.
She’d found things that had brought her to her knees, like the ribbon he’d taken from her hair when he’d first begun to court her. She remembered that day—he’d stuffed it into his pocket and declared it a good-luck charm. She’d found a small jeweler’s box, tied with another ribbon, and a diamond brooch inside. Was it for her birthday? Their anniversary? She read the ledgers into which he painstakingly entered the numbers of gazettes printed, the page lengths, the printing costs, the paper costs. His figures were so small and neat that when she rested her cheek on the ledger after one long night, she’d dreamed the tiny figures had danced their way into her skin.
And then there were the men upon whom Percy had relied to publish his gazette. The printers, the distributors. When Hollis had gone round to inquire about carrying on, they had looked at her with skepticism and disbelief. Or worse—some of them had laughed.
It was hard, it was aggravating, but Hollis had learned so much about herself in the process. She’d learned how to speak up for herself. She’d learned to ask for things she wanted and not to fold at the first no, because the first answer was always no. She’d learned that in the next life, she would like to come back to this earth as a man, with all the confidence and bravado that was granted to that sex by the mere virtue of being born.
She had changed the gazette, had seen it grow to tenfold the circulation Percy had ever enjoyed. Would he be proud of her? Or would he be scandalized by the sorts of things she printed? Her memories of Percy, of knowing him like she knew herself, were fading from her marrow. She remembered specific things about him, and she remembered moments they’d shared. But she couldn’t any longer remember how she felt when she was with him.
She walked to the chaise, pushed aside two hats, and sat heavily. Ruth had made a fire for her. The cold was seeping in through the windows. It would be Christmas soon, another one without Percy or Eliza.
Her challenge now was learning to live alone. Percy was gone. Eliza was gone. Caroline was gone. And from the sound of it, Pappa would be gone, too. Even Donovan was gone. Not gone, really—he hadn’t said it, but she suspected