I was cutting Sophie’s lemon cake when a white courier van pulled up at the curb.
A young man climbed out carrying three identical boxes stacked in his arms. Dark blue velvet. Each one tied with a silver ribbon that caught the fairy lights.
“Delivery for Emma, Sophie, and Claire?”
The girls glanced at each other.
“That’s us,” Emma said.
He set the boxes on the table between the cakes and left. The party noise dipped, the way it does when something unexpected lands in the middle of a celebration.
On top of the stack sat a plain white envelope. Two words were written across it in slanted blue ink.
READ FIRST.
My body recognized the handwriting before my mind did. My chest went tight. My fingers went cold around the cake knife. It was the same hand that had written You’ll manage on a sheet of paper I had kept, God help me, in a kitchen drawer for twenty-one years.
