I rolled down my window, and Hannah climbed in beside me, still shaking. Before I could answer, Celeste reached the car. She was no longer smiling. In a small, cracked voice she asked whether I had read it. I told her I had, and that I had never planned to show it to anyone. Margaret’s instructions were clear. The letter was only for Celeste, and only if she was unkind to me. I held the envelope out through the window.

Celeste read it standing in the headlights, and then she sat down on the gravel in her silk gown. Between sobs she told Hannah the truth. Her real name was Celeste Dupree, and her mother had been a seamstress who hemmed other people’s dresses to keep them fed. When she married into the Whitmore family, she was ashamed and told everyone she had no family. Her mother died three years later, and Celeste stayed away from the funeral to avoid questions. Margaret, who had stayed in touch with the old woman, was the only person who ever knew.

I knelt beside her in the gravel and said nothing. I thought about forty years of hemming other people’s happy days, and about the woman who had spent thirty-five years running from a mother just like me. Hannah wrapped her arms around her new mother-in-law, and I finally understood Margaret’s letter. She had not written it to punish anyone. She had written it so that someone, someday, would say the truth out loud.

Celeste walked back into the tent in her ruined gown and asked the quartet to stop playing. She told two hundred guests that her mother had been a seamstress, that I had restored the finest dress she had ever seen, and that the table by the kitchen had been her shame, not mine. Then she seated me at the head table beside Hannah. A year later she brought her mother’s old sewing machine to my shop, and every Thursday we mend side by side.