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concerned? Val knew herself. She knew her parents. She could hear the love in her father’s voice when he spoke to her on the phone. She could remember how she and her mother had giggled together when they snuck off to the movies. Caroline O’Mara’s mother never giggled. She just played golf.
    If she had been adopted, Val decided, her mother would have told her. Maybe not when she was little, but at some point. Her mother wouldn’t have just died without telling her, or at least hinting. Her mother loved her too much not to have given her some warning.
    Val got up and walked over to her closet. She pulled out the lavender-flowered hatbox she’d requested for her fifteenth birthday, and opened it. Inside were all her favorite, most secret possessions. With a sigh, she took out the notebook her mother’s nurse had given her three months before her mother’s death.
    â€œWrite things down,” the nurse had said. “You may find that helps.”
    Nothing had helped during those months, and Val was never much of a writer anyway. But when a grownup told her to do something, she did it, so there were two months worth of entries. Val hadn’t touched the notebook since the day of the funeral. It wasn’t a period in her life she ever wanted to relive. But maybe her mother had said something, and she had been too young or too scared to realize what she’d meant.
    The entries started out long and flowery, as though Val had expected the sisters to grade her work. But within a couple of weeks they were short, half-finished sentences. “Bad night.” “Mama very sick.” “Heard Daddy crying.”
    It hurt Val to read those entries, but she skimmed through anyway. Close to the end of her notations, she found what she was hoping she wouldn’t.
    â€œMama says she wrote me letter.”
    Val closed her eyes and tried to remember the conversation. Her mother had been given a lot of drugs, and she wasn’t always coherent, and Val had been a little scared of being alone with her. But this was one of the better days. “I wrote you a letter,” her mother had said. “But don’t open it now.”
    Val had promised not to, then changed the subject. There had been so much she’d wanted to tell her mother in those last weeks, not important things, but the sorts of things they’d always talked about, friends and school and family. Her mother had loved those conversations, and Val had tried to come up with funny stories to entertain her and make her laugh. So Val knew then and now that the letter was something her mother judged serious. And Val knew the time had come to find the letter and read it.
    She left her bedroom and went to her mother’s room. Her parents had shared a bedroom until the last few months of her mother’s illness, and then her father had moved into one of the guest rooms, and ended up staying there. So her parents’ room remained pretty much as it was during her mother’s life. Val couldn’t remember the last time her father had gone in there.
    She walked to her mother’s closet, opened the door, and looked for the old shoe-box her mother had cherished. “My wedding shoes came in this box,” she’d told Val when Val was very little. “So I keep all my favorite, most secret things in it. Daddy just thinks it has shoes.” She and Val had giggled that Mama could put one over on Daddy, who was so smart about everything. Once or twice her mother had taken the box out to show Val her treasures. There were photographs of old boyfriends in there, and one of Val’s father looking very young and foolish in a bathing suit. There were letters Val’s uncle had written before he’d been killed, and a pressed corsage that gave everything in the box the faint scent of gardenias. There were a couple of pieces of junk jewelry, whose significance Val could only guess at, and a lock of baby hair she