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next day because it was going to rain by late morning, despite what the forecast said.
    Holly had inherited the Maguire trait of not knowing.
    She recalled her grandmother telling her last year at Thanksgiving that she wasn’t so sure John was the one, that he didn’t seem to be serious about Holly in that place deep inside him. John and Lizzie had been invited for Thanksgiving, but John went to his parents instead with Lizzie and Holly hadn’t been invited. Yet the next day he’d told Holly he loved her, and as she sometimes did, though it made her feel bad, she thought perhaps her grandmother didn’t really know, that it was just old-world wisdom and worry.
    But of course she’d known.
    The night John had broken up with her, she’d picked up the phone to call her grandmother to find Camilla had left her a message. “Thinking of you, as always.” She’d somehow known. She’d called her grandmother and explained that she’d served the sa cordula to John and that he’d hated it and spat it out, but that it was little consolation that John wasn’t her great love because he was. And her grandmother told her to change her flight to Maine for the next day, even though they’d recently made plans for Holly to visit in two weeks. And when Holly had called her boss in the morning to call in sick (well, brokenhearted), she’d asked if she could switch her vacation,and her boss had told her he’d planned to have a talk with her when she came in that day, that she was too slow and they had to let her go, sorry. She would soon have been out of a place to live too, since her roommate’s boyfriend, who was always over lately, had now officially moved in. Since the roommate had the apartment first, Holly had been told a couple of weeks prior that she’d need to move out, sorry. She’d thought she’d be invited to move in with John. But he’d been sorry too.
    Everyone was sorry and Holly had had nowhere to be.
    Her grandmother had known she was dying, which was why she’d asked Holly to come in September. To be comforted by her granddaughter before she died. And to be there.
    Camilla Constantina wasn’t truly psychic; 30 percent of the time, in Camilla’s own estimation, she was wrong, but usually involving things that were asked of her—“Will I get married?” (Pamela Frumm, who managed Blue Crab Island Books, was forty-two and still hadn’t found her guy after her grandmother had told her for ten years that “Yes, of course you will.” But sometimes Holly would wonder if her grandmother was just being kind. Why say no? What would that have done to Pamela Frumm, who could often be seen in high heels and lipstick and awaiting her Match.com date, who could be the one?) And her grandmother had been sure that her great-aunt Giada’s cancer would take her around Christmastime, and two years later, she was still waking up at five every morning to roll out pasta for her son’s restaurant in Milan.
    But 70 percent of the time, Camilla was right. Whether about the Red Sox or someone’s true love or a tornado. Hollyhad often wondered if it was more difficult to know than not to know.
    She got out of bed, walked over to the dresser, and opened the top drawer, where she knew she’d find her grandmother’s diaries, a stack of four black-and-white composition notebooks that she wrote in English. She took them out and put them on the dresser, stopping to open one of the bottles of perfume and drawing out the stick, rubbing just a bit on her wrist, the smell of her grandmother’s favorite perfume as soothing as her hugs.
    Holly had found the diaries the day of her grandmother’s funeral, when she’d come upstairs to get away from her mother, tsk-tsking Holly for refusing to sell the house, and her father, stuffing his face with plate after plate of buffalo wings, a kitchen full of food that her grandmother would never have touched, delivered by neighbors she’d done so much for. Holly hadn’t felt right reading her