The Rossetti Letter (v5) Read Online Free

Claire’s mother Emily bought the house, Claire had agreed that it was charming, in a cottage sort of way, but after living there for two years she’d become unhappily familiar with its every idiosyncrasy. There wasn’t a true right angle anywhere, and it wouldn’t do to look too closely at the corners. Not that you could if you wanted to. Claire had moved her belongings in without moving her mother’s out, and the result was a cozy—some would say messy—jumble of furniture and knickknacks and way too many books.
    The clutter helped to fill up a house that had felt empty ever since Emily died. Her mother was only fifty-four when she’d been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Claire had been in the doctoral program at Columbia University in New York, and she’d taken a leave of absence from her studies to look after Emily following the first surgery. As her mother’s disease progressed, what began as a three-month hiatus from school turned into two years. Two years of hospitals, of surgeries, of chemotherapy and its debilitating aftermath, of watching her mother become frail and listless and in constant pain. Two years during which she and her husband, Michael, spent many nights apart. Claire had worn his favorite sweater, the brown one with the light tan stripes, when she slept in the tiny bed in her mother’s guest room, just so she could have the scent of him surrounding her.
    Ex-husband, Claire reminded herself. Most of the time she didn’t allow herself to feel sentimental, but every once in a while—seeing a young couple holding hands on the commons, a swaddled baby in a stroller—she was painfully aware of everything she’d lost.
    They had fallen in love six years ago, soon after being accepted into their respective Ph.D. programs: Claire in European history, Michael in ancient history—the Greeks and the Romans. She cringed to think of it now but, in a move highly uncharacteristic for her, she’d gotten his attention by “accidentally” dropping her books at his feet. Not only had Claire never done anything so obvious before, she had acted in defiance of an intuitive voice she heard the moment she first saw him: He’s too good looking to be trusted. She’d ignored that voice through a whirlwind courtship, a wedding less than a year later, and three years of marriage. After all, what other man had ever understood her passion for the past, her overwhelming desire to bury her nose in books? Old, arcane books, at that. Michael was the first boyfriend she’d had who didn’t accuse her of being “out of touch”: his interests were even more obscure than her own. But the things that had brought them together hadn’t been enough to keep them together, not with the strain of her mother’s illness and their repeated separations.
    Three months after her mother died, Claire transferred from Columbia to Harvard and resumed work on her dissertation. Soon she’d fallen into a routine: once or twice a month she went up to the university and spent a day in the library, but more often she worked in the guest room that she’d turned into a home office. She seldom bothered to change out of her favorite flannel pajamas and rarely left her office except to make a cup of tea or a quick sandwich that later she couldn’t recall making or eating. Her dissertation filled her thoughts so completely that sometimes it was a shock, at the end of the day, to find herself returned to her mundane, uneventful, twenty-first–century existence.
    Claire supposed Meredith had a point; she had sort of shut herself away, she thought as she rummaged in the fridge for something approximating dinner. But only because it was so important to finish her dissertation as soon as she possibly could. Her mother’s illness had set her back more than two years—two years during which her peers had gone on to get degrees and jobs. Michael already had a prestigious position as an assistant professor of classics at Columbia.
    With an avocado and