Augusta still dressed in her same capris and ballet flats every morning, still battled with her curly hair, still tracked all her food in her calorie counter app, yet she was a new person. She’d thought she’d cry a lot more than she had or be depressed in general. But once she’d broken up with Chris, she’d realized that she’d already said goodbye long ago. Her body was simply joining her mind and heart now.
Between the breakup and moving in with her mom, she had lost track of time and had almost forgotten that she was supposed to go to the archives with Leo today. She’d avoided him for the past week, though he’d mostly been in Boston anyway. When she heard his knock at the door and looked up, her breath caught in her throat. It seemed a cruel trick of the universe that he looked extra handsome that day in a dark blue button-down, his chestnut hair adorably tousled.
“Ready for a road trip?”
If she had been afraid that seeing him so soon after the breakup might complicate her feelings, she was right. How could she share the same room, let alone car, with someone who made her heart race just at the sight of him? And that was not what she needed right then. She needed time and space to find herself. But they had already arranged the trip and he didn’t have any clue about her feelings or the storm that was raging in her heart. Besides, she was dying of curiosity about what might be in the archives concerning Margaret.
“Yep,” she said, trying not to appear flustered. Gathering up her notes and water bottle, she followed him out to his car.
Outside, Leo clicked a key fob and a sporty black sedan beeped from the road. Cars were not something Augusta really ever gave much thought to—they were meant to get you from point A to point B as far as she was concerned—but for some reason she found herself intrigued by his. Maybe it was because it reminded her of him: sharp, understated and playfully sophisticated. “You can throw your stuff in the back,” Leo said as he hastily brushed aside some papers from the passenger seat.
It was a strange, intimate thing to be sharing so small a space with Leo. Everywhere there were little glimpses of his personality, like the seasonal pool pass hanging from the rearview mirror, the gym bag and stack of library books in the back seat. He was polite and kind as ever, but there was a slightly more formal edge to his demeanor today, and Augusta wondered if it was because of their encounter with Chris the week before.
Leo plugged in an old-school adapter into the dashboard and began scrolling through his phone. “What kind of music do you like?”
The old Augusta would have carefully curated her answer before she spoke, trying to anticipate what kind of music someone like Leo would like and matching that. But she had wasted too much of her life already trying to mold herself to what she thought a man would want from her. “Florence and the Machine is my favorite, but I also love Stevie Nicks, Rihanna, Adele...” She’d been listening to a lot of powerful female vocalists since the breakup, and though she would never admit to it, belting out anthems in her car on the way to work made her feel empowered.
“I definitely have Fleetwood Mac,” he said. As they pulled out, he hit Play and the sound of “The Chain” filled the car.
They stopped for coffee and doughnuts, and Augusta randomly chose a giant, chocolate-glazed monstrosity that she held in her lap, picking at it without really eating.
“Any plans for the weekend?” Leo asked as he brushed powdered sugar off his pant leg.
Her only plans consisted of dodging her mother’s attempts at setting her up with a coworker’s son, and maybe finally going through her dad’s stuff. “Not really,” she said, gazing out the window. Maybe she would finally pick up her sketching again, a hobby she’d let fall by the wayside over the past few years.
“Are you okay? You seem...distant.”
Augusta forced a smile, which she was sure looked as fake as it felt. Leo was probably the last person in the world she should confide in, yet she was desperate to talk to someone. She had no close female friends anymore, and she was way too mortified to talk to her mother. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just been a weird week.”
She could feel Leo glancing at her before merging onto the highway. “Want to talk about it?”
Shrugging, she pretended to be absorbed in peeling a sticker off her water bottle. “My boyfriend and I broke up. It was a long time coming, but it’s been rough all the same.”
Again, the sensation of Leo’s gaze flitting to her. “Oh, yeah?” His voice held an undeniable note of interest.
“Yeah,” she confirmed.
“Sorry, that came out wrong. I’m really sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks,” she mumbled into her water.
“If you want to talk about it, I’m a good listener,” he said, flashing that lethally disarming smile of his.
Augusta hesitated. Was he offering because he legitimately wanted to help? Or was he just hoping for a juicy story? But there was something about him that made her think he was in earnest, that he actually cared. “There’s nothing really to tell. We weren’t right for each other and things finally came to a head.”
“So it was mutual?”
“Um.” Since the breakup, Chris had sent her several texts. They’d ranged from pleading to angry, and eventually she began deleting all of them without reading. “He wasn’t completely on board with the idea.”
“Either way, that must have been hard, for both of you.”
The highway whizzed past them, and Augusta chewed on her lip, replaying in her mind the absurdly horrifying moment when Chris had dropped to his knees and asked her to marry him. “He proposed to me,” she blurted out before she could stop herself. “He said he’d been planning on asking me to marry him when I broke up with him.”
She could feel Leo digest this, studying her from the corner of his eye while he drove. “That kind of sounds like coincidental timing. Had you guys talked about marriage?”
“I think he just said that to make me feel guilty. I don’t think he really wanted to get married.”
“Did he do that a lot? Try to make you feel guilty?”
Augusta shrugged. “I’m kind of a guilty-by-default person,” she said. “I always thought the fights were all my fault. Anytime something was wrong, I blamed myself.”
There was silence for a beat, and she wondered if she was getting too personal too fast. But then Leo spoke. “I know I don’t know you that well, but you don’t strike me as someone who has a lot to feel guilty about. You seem like someone who tries really hard and goes out of her way to make people feel comfortable. I’m sure some people take that as license to shift blame away from themselves, but that’s on them, not you.”
Augusta blinked. Damn, he was a good listener. And he was right—he didn’t know her, but his kindness was enough to bring tears to her eyes. She sniffed them back. “I just can’t believe I let myself be manipulated for so long,” she said with a groan. “I was so stupid.”
“Hey.” Leo leaned over and let his hand hover over her knee as if he was going to pat her leg. He must have thought better of it because to her disappointment, he placed it back on the wheel. “You’re not stupid, Augusta. He sounds like a manipulative bastard.”
Her first instinct was to defend Chris, the way she had for years every time someone rightly pointed out a red flag about him, but she didn’t owe him that anymore. “Yeah, he is,” she agreed. It felt good to finally say it.
“Do you have somewhere safe to stay?”
It took her a moment to realize what he was asking, and she almost laughed. Chris might have been overprotective and obstinate about some things, but he wasn’t violent. “I’m staying with my mom,” she said. “Until I can find a place of my own.”
“That’s good.”
She desperately wanted to ask if he was in a relationship himself, but there wasn’t a good way to say it without betraying that she was interested. Which, to be fair, she supposed she was.
As if reading her mind, Leo said, “My girlfriend and I broke up two years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Did that mean he was single now? Two years was a long time—had he not dated since then? “Was it on good terms?” she asked cautiously.
His expression clouded. “It was complicated,” he said. “She passed away a few months after we broke up.”
“Oh, Leo. I’m so sorry.”
He gave a little shrug, and though it was a casual gesture, Augusta knew from personal experience how much emotion it probably held. “Like I said, it was complicated.”
They lapsed into silence. The car began picking up speed, and Augusta shifted uncomfortably in her seat. They were in the fast lane, the scenery whizzing past them. Reaching for the safety handle, Augusta took a peek at the speedometer and nearly did a double take. They were going almost 85 mph.
“Do you, um, always drive so fast?” she asked, her knuckles tightening around the handle.
“Hmm?” Leo glanced at her as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Oh, sorry. I like opening up on the highway and sometimes I get carried away.” He slowed down and Augusta’s heart rate likewise slowed back to normal.
The rest of the trip was spent listening to Stevie Nicks belt out the classics. Gradually, houses and neighborhoods replaced the trees, and then the suburbs transitioned to the dense city blocks of Boston. They pulled up behind a stately brick building in the heart of the city across from the Public Garden.
“You said you’ve never been to the Harlowe mansion before, right?” Leo asked as they pulled into the small side lot.
Augusta shook her head. “I never even knew it existed until I was hired.”
He grinned. “Well, you’re in for a treat. I’ll give you a quick tour before getting you set up in the archives.”
Augusta was itching to get her hands on those documents, but she couldn’t turn down a private tour from Leo. They went in through the front where a ticket counter was set up in the front hall. “Hey, Monica,” Leo said, waving to a young woman with long brown hair in a white button-down behind the desk. “Have you met Augusta yet? She’s our new collections manager at Harlowe.”
Augusta shook her hand, then stood by awkwardly while Leo and Monica caught up on some small talk. “We’re going to zip through the house real fast before heading up to the archives—is that all right?” Leo asked.
“They’re between tours right now, so just be quick and you’ll be fine.”
“Great.” Leo motioned for Augusta to follow him out of the front vestibule and past the counter.
If she had thought that Harlowe House was elegant, the Boston mansion was a picture of Victorian refinement at its best. Leo led her through a formal dining room that made the dining room at Harlowe House look quaint by comparison. The table was set with crystal stemware that twinkled in the sunlight let in from the floor-length windows. “How often was the family here?” she asked him. It was nowhere near as homey and welcoming as the house in Tynemouth.
“The history of the family isn’t my strong point, but I’m pretty sure Harlowe House was their main residence until the 1870s or so. I think after that one of the brothers lived here and the place in Tynemouth was more of a summer retreat.”
The 1870s. So, right when Margaret was supposedly living. Would she have come here to visit her brother? Had she dined in this very room, surrounded by the elegant, powder blue molding and gilded mirrors?
They headed up a gracious marble staircase just as a tour was starting downstairs. Leo swiped his card at the door at the top. “I just have to grab my charger from my office,” he told her over his shoulder as he led her down the hall.
Augusta stood in the doorway while he rifled through his desk drawers. There were a couple of framed photos on the desk facing away from her, and a neat row of Matchbox cars. File folders sat in piles, and there was a shelf of binders with labels like “Summer Programming 2016” and “Tynemouth Artist CO-OP Directory.” A shriveled fern sat next to the only window. “So, this is the wellspring of public engagement, huh?”
He flashed her a grin before returning to his search. “Oh, yeah. All the magic happens here. Don’t blame me for the plant, though—I think it was dead when I got it. Aha, there it is.” He waved the charger triumphantly and then led her down the hall to the archives.
Augusta had pictured a grand hall lined with books and old-fashioned green library lamps, but in reality, it was a modest room with two reading stations and a modern shelving system.
A middle-aged woman with light skin and a silver pixie cut sat behind the desk. “Hey, Lori, this is Augusta.”
Augusta shook her hand. “I think we’ve emailed a couple of times.”
“Of course! So nice to meet you in person. So, Leo says you’re doing some research on the Harlowe women around the 1860s through the 1880s?”
Augusta had decided that she would have the best chance of finding information about Margaret if she kept the parameters of her research vague. She nodded. “That’s right.”
“I got out some reels for you to start with on the microfiche, mostly of transcribed journals and ledgers from that period. When you’re done with those, I can pull out specific correspondences.”
When Lori had gone back to her desk, Leo made sure that Augusta had everything she needed. “I’ll be down the hall in my office. Just come and find me when you’re ready. Or, actually...” He paused, glancing at his watch. “Why don’t we grab some lunch across the street at one? You’ll probably be about ready to give your eyes a break by then.”
Augusta instinctively prepared herself to turn down the invitation, especially since it involved food. But why shouldn’t they grab lunch? She didn’t have to worry about Chris grilling her later about who she’d been with, and she knew she had to eat to something. There couldn’t be any more fainting spells or hallucinations at work. “Lunch sounds perfect,” she told him.
Jill had been right: there wasn’t even so much as a mention of Margaret Harlowe. Dizzy from whirring through the microfiche, Augusta let her mind wander as she stared sightlessly out the window. Why wouldn’t a wealthy, notable family want any trace of their daughter to survive? Had she committed some sort of unforgivable transgression? The Victorians were notoriously prudish when it came to scandals and love affairs, and Augusta had come across more than one case when a zealous descendant had decided to take things into their own hands and censor the historical record. But this was different. There wasn’t even so much as a scratched-out name in a family Bible, or a veiled reference to a disappointing daughter.
She was going to have to get creative. Scrolling through the rest of the journals, she skipped to the ledger entries. Correspondence and diaries could tell a story, but numbers didn’t lie. There had to be a record of expenses that showed that Margaret Harlowe had existed.
The portrait in the Harlowe dining room suggested that the sitter had been in her teens or early twenties in the 1870s, so Augusta raced through the reels from about twenty-five years earlier. If Margaret had been born sometime in the 1850s, then there should be something from that period that suggested a birth had occurred. Perhaps there had been an expense for a doctor to come and deliver the baby, or maybe her mother had needed a new wardrobe of maternity clothes. She checked her notes to see when the three brothers were born so she could rule them out, and then she began carefully scanning the cramped rows of numbers and shorthand.
It was mind-numbing work, so she almost missed the innocuous entry in the ledger. She paused the microfiche and then rolled it back another page. There. She squinted at the entry, double-checking that it really said what she thought it said.
She was hurriedly scribbling notes when her phone buzzed with a message from Leo asking if she was ready. Two hours had flown by, and she found that she almost wished she didn’t have to pause her work to meet up with him.
But as soon as she stepped out of the archives onto the busy streets of Boston, she was glad for the break. It was like stepping out of the past and back into the present. They wove through groups of tourists and college students, the aroma of roasted nuts and fried dough hanging in the crisp air. As much as she loved the quaintness of Tynemouth, there was an energy to the city that made Augusta feel as if anything was possible. Coupled with her newfound singleness, walking across the Boston Public Garden with Leo beside her gave her a heady sense of freedom.
The Thai café Leo had recommended was mostly empty, so they slid into a big booth in the back. It was dimly lit and cozy, with soft instrumental music playing, and Augusta had to remind herself that this wasn’t a date.
“So, did you find anything good? Any Margaret sightings?” Leo asked after the waiter had taken their orders.
“Well, not exactly,” she admitted. “But—” She pulled out one of the photocopies that Lori had made for her and handed it to Leo “—I did find this. It’s the Harlowe household ledger from 1858.”
She tried to hide her excitement as she watched him scan the document. “What am I looking at exactly?”
“Right here,” she said, leaning across the table and tapping at one of the entries. “It’s an expense for five bolts of fabric. Then if you look down here—” she craned her neck, trying to find the other entry upside down “—there’s a dressmaker’s charge for ‘girls’ dresses, times five.’”
Leo looked up, and she could tell by his expression that he understood the significance. “There were three brothers, so why would Jemima and Clarence Harlowe be buying girls’ dresses unless...”
“...unless they also had a daughter,” Augusta finished for him.
“Wow.” Leo leaned back, his appreciative gaze making her shiver. “That is some amazing detective work.”
Their food came and Margaret was momentarily forgotten. The noodles smelled amazing, but she’d picked at that giant doughnut in the car already, and she was probably way over her calories for the day. She’d have some of the bean sprouts on top, maybe a piece of the tofu, but that was it.
Leo was tucking into his curry. “God, this is so good. How’s yours?”
“Good,” she said, though she hadn’t actually taken more than a nibble.
She could feel Leo watching her, wanting to say something. She was used to that from friends and family, always commenting on her eating habits, and it only heightened her self-consciousness around food. Why had she agreed to lunch?
He slid her plate closer to her. “Go ahead, I promise you it’s good.”
She hesitated. What was she going to do? Just sit there staring at her plate like she’d never seen food before? All she had to do was lift the fork to her mouth, yet it felt as if her hands were made of lead.
When she looked up from her plate, she found that he had resumed eating. No, not just eating, inhaling his food, noodles dripping out of his mouth. He smacked his lips loudly and grunted. It was like watching a three-year-old trying food for the first time. “This is really good.”
Aghast, she flicked her glance around at the mostly empty restaurant. “What are you doing?”
“I’m eating,” he said around his mouth full of food.
“That’s how you eat?”
“Yeah—” he paused to swallow “—is that how you eat?”
“I—” She stopped as his meaning became clear. He was trying to put her at ease, trying to show her that she didn’t have anything to feel self-conscious about. “No...” she said carefully.
Leo was suddenly absorbed in his phone, and she had the feeling he was doing it for her benefit. Taking a deep breath, she picked up her fork and took a bite. He had been right; the noodles were good. She would figure out the calories later, when it wouldn’t spoil her precious time with Leo.
When they had finished and Augusta had gotten a container for her leftovers, Leo flagged down the waiter and asked for the check. She couldn’t be sure, but the card he slipped into the billfold didn’t look like the Harlowe credit card.
“So, what’s next?” Leo asked, signing the check. “More Margaret hunting?”
“Yeah, I want to go back a few years earlier and see if I can find anything about her before the charges for the dress.” Because something still wasn’t right with the numbers. She had easily been able to find evidence that matched up with all three births of the brothers, but there had been nothing that even hinted at the birth of a fourth child. A daughter wouldn’t have needed dresses until she was at least a couple of years old. So where was the proof of her birth? Where had Margaret Harlowe come from?