13 Little Blue Envelopes(69)

“You could stay in London. Lots to do in London.”

“I guess,” she said.

“Look,” he said with a sigh, “you’ve just been given loads of cash. Use it on anything you want. Stop wondering about that last letter, which must be what you’re wondering about. You figured it all out. It all worked out.”

She shrugged.

“What did you want it to say?” he asked. “You know it would have led you back to the poster. You managed to get what she was trying to give you. You found out Richard is your uncle. What more is there to know?”

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Apparently there is something you want to know.”

“Are we dating?” she asked.

“What is dating, really?”

“Don’t,” she said. “Seriously.”

“All right.” Keith reached over and switched off the televi -

sion. “It’s a fair question. “But you’ve got to go home, eventually.

You know that.”

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“I know,” she said. “I was just checking. But are we kind of something?”

“You know how I feel.”

“But,” Ginny said, “can you . . . say it?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “We’re definitely kind of something.”

There was something in the fact that he said it—said something—that made Ginny incredibly happy.

And in that second, she knew exactly what it was the thirteenth envelope would have told her to do.

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Lucky Thirteen

It wasn’t logical, but in Ginny’s mind it seemed like there should have been something special to commemorate the sale of the

“Harrods paintings.” But Harrods seemed unaware of the event or the artist it had been harboring in its eaves. Harrods was just Harrods. Busy, crowded. Life was moving on here as it had before.

The woman at the chocolate counter rolled her eyes as Ginny approached.

“Just a moment,” she said. “I’ll call Mr. Murphy.”

Ginny had stopped on the way to see if any money had

appeared in her account. It had, in fact—so she took out a hundred pounds for good measure. She pulled it out of her pocket now and concealed it in her palm.

“He’s on his way down, miss,” she said unenthusiastically.

“What’s the best chocolate you have?” Ginny asked, looking over the display.

“It depends on what you like.”

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“Which ones do you like?”

“The champagne truffles,” she said. “But they’re sixty pounds a box.”

“I’ll take one.”

The woman raised her eyebrows as Ginny slid over the

money. A moment later, she was presented with a heavy bronze box. Ginny tucked the receipt under the brown ribbon and slid the box back toward the woman.

“These are for you,” she said. “Thanks for everything.”

As she walked away from the counter, she wondered if this having money thing might not just work out after all.

She took Richard to the fancy tearoom. It seemed like the right thing to do. For all the time she’d spent in England so far, she hadn’t had any fancy tea. Now they were facing down a multi-tiered tray of tiny sandwiches and cakes.

“Come to spend your fortune?” Richard asked.

“Kind of,” she said. She stared down into the delicate porce-lain teacup their waiter had just filled.

“What does that mean?”

“I was right to sell the paintings,” she asked, “wasn’t I?”

“I was there for that bit,” he said. “The end, all the confusion. That’s what those paintings caught. I don’t want to remember that bit, Ginny. It wasn’t always her.”

“How did she even write the letters?” Ginny asked.

“She was lucid sometimes, and in the next moment, she’d

think that the walls were covered in ladybugs or that

the postbox had just spoken to her. To be honest, sometimes I couldn’t tell if it was painful or if she was enjoying all 316

the strange things she was seeing. Peg was . . . full of wonder.”

“I know what you mean,” Ginny said.

They filled their plates with the tiny sandwiches. Richard ate for a few minutes. Ginny assembled hers in four points along the edge of her plate like a compass, or maybe a clock.

“In the last letter I read,” she began, “she told me something. It just occurred to me that she may not have told you.”

Richard froze mid-reach for a tiny cucumber sandwich.

“She said she loved you,” Ginny went on. “She said she was head over heels for you. She was mad at herself for leaving, but she was just frightened. But just so you know.”

Judging from the look on his face (she thought his eyebrows might come loose from all the wiggling up and down), Ginny knew that he hadn’t known this. And she also knew that now, she was really done. She suddenly felt very light.

In fact, she wasn’t even embarrassed when Richard came

over to her side of the table and wrapped his arms around her.

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