Chapter 3: What the Note Said
I asked the hotel manager to leave us.
He nodded once, quietly, and pulled the door shut behind him.
Sophie was still holding the necklace, turning it over in her small fingers.
The seashell caught the last of the afternoon light coming through the window.
"Mama, why are you crying?"
"I'm not crying, sweetheart." I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
"I'm just surprised."
"Is it a good surprise or a bad surprise?"
I looked down at the paper in my hands.
"I don't know yet."
I read the note from the beginning.
*Anna.*
*I know you have every reason to throw this away without reading it.
I'm asking you not to.*
*I've been following Sophie's treatment from a distance.
I know that's not something you asked me to do, and I know it doesn't make up for anything.
But I need you to know that I never stopped thinking about her.
Not for a single day.*
*I arranged this trip.
Your father didn't pay for it.
I asked him to let me, and I asked him not to tell you.
Please don't be angry with him.
I made it very hard for him to say no.*
*There is more I need to say to you.
Not in a letter.
There is a card at the bottom of the box with a number.
If you can find it in yourself to call, I will answer.*
*If you can't, I understand.
But please give Sophie the necklace.
I found the shell on this same beach, a long time ago.
I always meant to bring her here myself.*
*— Daniel*
I stood very still.
My father had known.
He had let me believe he was paying for this trip.
He had sat across from me at his kitchen table and watched me thank him, and he had said nothing.
"Mama." Sophie tugged my sleeve.
"Who is the necklace from?"
I folded the note carefully.
"Someone who wanted you to have it."
"Do I know them?"
I looked at her face.
Six years old.
Pale from the treatment, but her eyes were bright from the ocean, still bright from running along the shore an hour ago.
"Not yet," I said.
Sophie held the necklace up to the window.
The shell was small and pale, almost translucent, shaped like a spiral.
"It looks like something from The Little Mermaid," she said.
My throat closed again.
I reached into the box and found the card at the bottom, exactly where Daniel said it would be.
A plain white card.
A phone number written in the same handwriting as the note.
Nothing else.
I set it on the bedside table.
Sophie looked at it, then looked at me.
"Are you going to call?"
"I haven't decided."
"You should," she said, very simply, and went back to looking at her necklace.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time after that.
The card sat on the table.
The number didn't move.
Outside, the ocean kept going, indifferent and enormous, the way it always had.
I thought about my father.
About the way he had hugged me at the airport and said, *take care of my girls.* The way he had said it like he was sending us somewhere he already knew about.
I picked up the card.
I put it back down.
Sophie had fallen asleep on top of the covers, still holding the necklace loosely in one hand.
Her breathing was slow and even.
In sleep, she looked so much like herself before the diagnosis — before the hospital smell became familiar, before I learned to read her blood results like a weather forecast.
I picked the card up again.
I didn't call that night.
But I didn't throw it away either.
May you like
And when I turned off the lamp and lay down beside her in the dark, I could hear the ocean through the window, and I thought about a man finding a shell on this same beach, a long time ago, and keeping it all these years.
That was the part I couldn't stop thinking about.
