For My Daughters
Chapter 03 - For My Daughters
Victoria returned to the restaurant alone, paid her bill in cash because her fingers couldn't manage the card reader on the first two attempts, retrieved her coat and her bag and the single red rose still lying on the white tablecloth, and sat in the back of a town car she'd called without remembering calling it, looking at the birth certificate folded in her lap for the entire forty-minute ride back to her building on the Upper East Side.
Her apartment occupied the top two floors of a pre-war building on East 73rd, the kind of space that required a considerable number of staff to maintain and produced, in its maintenance, the specific, silent impression of a place that had always existed exactly this way and intended to continue doing so indefinitely.
She went directly to the library, closed the door, and removed the Rosewood ring from her finger for the first time in eleven years.
She turned it over. Held it under the desk lamp.
The engraving on the inside of the band was in her mother's handwriting, she'd always known that, Eleanor Rosewood had commissioned the piece specifically with the intention of having her own hand visible inside it. But Victoria had read those words a thousand times, the same way you read something so familiar you stop actually seeing it, the letters becoming shapes rather than meaning.
For my daughters. Rosewood. 1956.
She put the ring on the desk beside the birth certificate.
The ring had been made in 1956. Eleanor Rosewood had been born in 1948, which meant she'd been eight years old when the ring was made.
Which meant Eleanor's own mother, Victoria's grandmother, had commissioned this ring.
Which meant the phrase for my daughters referred not to Eleanor's children at all, but to Eleanor and whoever Eleanor's sisters were, or had been, or had been intended to be.
But Eleanor had no sisters. There was no sister in any Rosewood family history Victoria had ever been given access to, and as the family's only heir, she had been given access to considerable history.
She opened her laptop and navigated directly to the digital archive she maintained access to through a private genealogy service her lawyers had arranged years ago during a separate estate matter. She typed her grandmother's name: Catherine Rosewood, née Hargrove.
Born 1920. Died 1978.
Two children listed: Eleanor Rosewood, 1948. And—
Victoria stared at the screen.
And Margaret Rosewood, 1948.
Twins.
Her grandmother had had twin daughters. Eleanor, who had become the family's public heir, and Margaret, about whom there was no further information whatsoever in any archive Victoria had access to, no death record, no marriage record, no further trace of existence beyond that single, parenthetical birth notation.
She thought of Clara's face. Of her own face, rearranged slightly by different years and different circumstances, looking back at her from a bench in a park.
The twin gene, she'd once been told by a doctor discussing something entirely unrelated, carries down the generations. Identical twins don't occur randomly.
She reached for her phone and called her attorney before she'd fully decided what she intended to say to him.
"James," she said, when he answered. "I need to know everything there is to know about a woman named Margaret Rosewood who was born in 1948 and then disappeared from the family's recorded history entirely. I need to know where she went, what happened to her, and whether she left any children. I need this by tomorrow morning."
She paused.
"And I need you to understand that this conversation is covered by attorney-client privilege and that nothing I've just told you leaves this call."
She hung up, and sat for a long time in the lamp-lit library while the city noise filtered up from the street seventy feet below, thinking about rings and daughters and secrets maintained across two generations with a thoroughness and patience that could only have been deliberate, only have been chosen, only have been sustained through consistent, careful, deliberate effort.
She thought of Clara on that bench, with her coat fraying at the cuff and her hands in her lap and her ancient, quiet patience.
She thought of Lily with her silver tray of roses, and the specific confidence of a child who has been told exactly where to go and exactly what to say and trusts completely the person who sent her.
May you like
She thought of her mother, Eleanor, who had apparently carried this particular secret from at least the age of eight, which meant she had spent seventy-six years never once saying the word that was engraved inside the ring on her own daughter's hand.
Daughters.
