Page 80 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

With a sigh, she headed back to her seat on the bed and scrolled TikTok for live reels. “Hello, Mariah,” said a woman with enormous arms chopping onions.

Not her speed. She clicked another and another, and finally found a woman in a turquoise blouse reading oracle cards. “Loneliness is rampant,” she said in her heavily accented English. Mariah halted. “But it does not need to be. The Mother tells us to lean on each other.” She turned over another card, held it up to the camera. “This is for Mariah. The Wise Woman wants you to reach out, baby. Reach out.”

Electrified, Mariah typed in, “I miss my mother so much.”

The woman nodded sagely. She closed her eyes, shuffled the cards in her hands, her red nails glistening in her ring lights. “Mmm. Mmm,” she said. “She misses you, too. She wants you to know you’re on the right track.” She showed the card she’d drawn, a stylized drawing of a physician. “She wants you to go to medical school. Is that right?”

Stung, Mariah just stared. She’d never wanted to go to medical school, or at least not since she was six and playing doctor like every other kid on the planet.

She was so disappointed that she closed the app and then her tablet, aching with the desire to believe in people who just wanted to take her money.

Medical school.

As if.

In the morning, she felt aggravated. Henry snapped at her when she got up late, but she’d been up in the middle of the night! What did he expect?

They headed to the airport at midmorning for the trip to Marrakech. At the airport, waiting at their gate, both Henry and Veronica were distracted, typing into their phones. Veronica had some issue going on at home, and Henry was deep into his book. He’d always been like that, able to switch off with a book at the drop of a hat. She wished she liked reading fiction. She had been leafing through the plague book, which was fascinating, but it was hard to read for more than an hour or so. She started feeling dizzy and tired. The doctors had told her that it was a side effect of her brain injury. It would heal in time, almost certainly. In the meantime, she needed a transportable hobby.

She was bored. Restless. She peered over at Veronica’s phone and saw that she wasn’t texting—duh, it was the middle of the night in Colorado—but playing a game. “What are you playing?”

“Hue,” she said. “It’s really aggravating, but it’s also really fun.”

“It’s pretty. You just move the squares?” She watched as Veronica shifted a block that looked blue to a section of other blues, and it was quite green in comparison.

“Justmakes it sound easy, but it will occupy my brain for ages.”

Mariah looked it up and downloaded it to her phone.

“You’ll like it better on your tablet,” Veronica said, and swore. “I’m actually pretty terrible at it, but it’s weirdly relaxing anyway.”

Mariah opened the app and started a game, moving squares. “What’s happening with the book and my mom’s letters and all that stuff?”

“Well, it’s still a bit of a question mark. We’ve tracked down some people, but I don’t have any more of your mom’s letters, which is where the real help will be, I think.” She swore as she dropped a square and had to pick it up again. “Do you remember anything she talked about with the book, what she wanted to do with it?”

“No. I wish I had paid attention,” she said, slumping into the chair. “I mean, she didn’t really talk all that much about it, but she was excited about café culture.”

“Do you know if she was under contract for this book?”

“No. She wasn’t. Jill checked into all that with her agent, so that the royalty checks can all come to my bank account now.”

Veronica nodded. She glanced up, and her eyes were the color of a turquoise bracelet Mariah had bought in Spain a long time ago. Purple shadows slung below them. “That’s good.” She sighed as the screen lit up with soft music and rewarded her for placing the last square. “I sent you an email about an agreement for the book. It might not make any money if it’s ghostwritten. Have you thought of that?”

“Not really, but it’s kind of about finishing the project for her, you know?”

“That’s fine, and it’s a good idea for you.”

“Dope. I’ll have Jill hammer something out. She’s a lawyer. We don’t need anything super detailed at the moment, right?”

“Right. Honestly, I just need to get paid.”

“I get it.”

Veronica closed her tablet and looked at Mariah. “This is delicate, but I worry about you a little. Are you going to have enough money, going forward?”

“Oh!” Mariah gave a hooting laugh. “I’m super good.”

Henry chuckled. “Understatement. Rachel and Jill’s father was Alexander Ellsworth, of Ellsworth Manufacturing. He had something like two hundred and forty-two patents.”