Gloria, that is Annes handwriting, Margaret said, her hand over her heart.
I froze. Anne was my mothers name. You knew my mother, I asked Margaret. Sweetheart, she said softly, we all did. Your mother and Gloria were best friends for twenty years. Until 1989.
I looked at Gloria. My mother in law had never once told me she had met my mother. Not at our wedding. Not at the funeral. Not ever.
The woman who threw away my dead mothers birthday letters and called them junk had been my mothers closest friend for twenty years, and had never breathed a word of it, because of something that happened in 1989 that drove my mother out of Charleston.
I unfolded the letter with shaking hands. The first lines were for me. Happy birthday. I am proud of you. But halfway down the page, my mother had written something else, and I read it out loud, because the whole book club had gone silent and Gloria was reaching for my wrist.
There is something I have never told you about Gloria, my mother had written, and about why I left Charleston. We were like sisters once. Then my own mother passed, and left the two of us as co trustees of a small inheritance meant for you, for your schooling, for your start. And Gloria emptied it. She forged my name on the trust and took all of it, and when I confronted her she told the whole town I was the thief. I could not prove it then. So I left, with you, and I started over, and I never spoke her name again. If you are reading this, and she is near you, you need to know what she is capable of, and you need to protect what is yours.
The book club did not make a sound. Margaret, who had known them both, closed her eyes, because she had wondered for thirty five years why two women who were like sisters suddenly were not.
Gloria had not thrown my mothers letters away. She had taken them, and read every one, because she needed to know whether my mother had told me, from the grave, what Gloria did in 1989. She was not decluttering. She was searching.
And she found her own name in my mothers hand, in a letter meant for my thirtieth birthday, confessing the whole thing to me at last.
Gloria married into proximity to me on purpose, I came to understand. When her son met me, she recognized the name, and she spent years close to me, waiting to find out what I knew, and throwing away the letters the moment she had a key and three days alone. She did not count on one old friend at a book club recognizing Annes handwriting on a pink envelope that fell out of a purse.
I got the letters back. All thirty four. Gloria had kept every one, which turned out to be the one decent instinct left in her, that even a thief could not bring herself to burn a dead womans words to her daughter.
My husband, Brian, did not know any of it. It is just old paper, he had said. He is not saying that anymore. He is helping me untangle what we can of a thirty five year old forged trust, because some thefts leave a shame the law cannot time out.
Gloria is not in our lives. A woman who robs her best friend and then robs the friends daughter of her last letters does not get a seat at my table or a key to my house.
I read one of my mothers letters every birthday, the way I always did. This year I read the thirtieth one, the one that fell out of a purse. I am proud of you, it said. Protect what is yours. I did, Mama. It took thirty five years, but I did.