A breath in, and a breath out.
“When do you have to go back?” she asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“So soon?” It was always going to be too soon.
“Here. I got you something.” He handed Olivia a silver photo frame. “A good-luck gift, and to replace the one the cat broke.” Hemingway had knocked the photo frame over the previous week while Olivia was on the phone with Ross. She’d only mentioned it in passing and was touched that he’d remembered. “I know it meant a lot to you,” he added.
Olivia took the gift, and as she did she reached for Ross’s hand, wrapping her fingers around his. Pieces of a puzzle that fit together perfectly.
THE BELL JINGLED brightly above the door of Something Old as Olivia stepped inside. The old silver picture frame sat on the desk, the glass cracked across Frances’s face where Hemingway had knocked it over. She turned it over, carefully loosening the clasps at the back. They were stiff and unyielding, having not been moved for such a long time. She broke two nails before resorting to scissors to prize the rusted clasps apart.
When the clasps finally relented, Olivia lifted off the black backing of the frame, then a layer of thin cardboard, beneath which was a lock of red hair and several fragile fragments of paper, which she placed on the desk, fitting them together piece by piece: the faintest hint of lavender, emerald, and blue, the tip of a wing, the edge of a dress. She smiled as she recognized the fairy cutouts from the photograph of Frances and the fairies. How clever of her great-grandmother Ellen to have kept them hidden here. Olivia thought how much she would have liked to meet her. She had a feeling they would have got along very well.
She turned her focus back to the picture frame then, lifting out a small photograph concealed behind the one of Frances. It was an unusual image, but Olivia recognized the waterfall, the beck, the backdrop of trees and ferns. Half a dozen dots of blurred light patterned the image, wispy strands of something misty and peculiar. She ran her fingertips over them lightly as a broad grin spread across her lips. It was the photograph Nana had described. She had remembered it correctly, after all.
With great care, Olivia placed everything into the new frame, exactly as it had been in the original. With everything in order, she pushed the clasps shut and stood the frame on the desk. Frances smiled back at her. Her secrets would always be safe.
The photograph often attracted comment and conversation, and as Olivia discovered, comment and conversation were what ultimately sold books. When people asked her if the fairies were real, she asked them what they thought. With only a few exceptions, most people chose to believe they were. Whether fairies were real or not, Olivia liked to believe in the possibility. As Pappy always said, possibility is where all the best stories begin.
From the very beginning, as far back as her great-grandmother Ellen, Olivia’s story hadn’t been conventional or easy, but each of the women in her life had kept turning the page, living another chapter, forming the provenance that she would, one day, inherit. Where once she had dreaded what lay ahead, Olivia now relished the prospect of filling the empty page. Hers was a narrative she would write in her own words, in her own time. She would be the mapmaker, the storyteller, the dreamer of dreams.
On brighter Sundays, when the two shops were closed, she loved to climb to the top of Howth Head and admire the view, and sometimes, when the wind blew in the right direction, she would catch it: a faint whisper at first and then louder. The refrain of a song her mammy used to sing to her, wildly operatic and wonderfully silly. She would close her eyes and listen, the golden autumn sun warm against her cheeks as she thought about the determined, inquisitive little girl she’d once been and the determined, optimistic woman she’d become.
She had always been there, watching, waiting.
To find her, all she’d had to do was believe in her.
THE END