“Who is this?” Sarah asked her as their eyes met. Mimi looked serious for a moment as she took it from her and looked at it with a wistful air.

“You've seen this before.” It was the only photograph Mimi had of her. All the others had vanished when she did. This one had been her father's. She had found it in his papers after he died. “It's my mother. It's the only photograph I have of her. She died when I was six.”

“Did she die, Mimi?” Sarah asked gently. She knew the truth now, as she realized clearly for the first time that her grandmother had never spoken to her of her own mother. And Sarah's mother had told her that her own grandmother had died when Mimi was six, so Audrey had never met her.

“What makes you ask something like that?” Mimi asked sadly, her eyes locked onto Sarah's.

“I saw that same photograph this week in a house we're selling for a client on Scott Street. We're selling it for his heirs actually. That's the house I mentioned at dinner. Twenty-forty Scott Street.”

“I remember the address,” Mimi said, as she put the photograph back on the dresser and turned to smile at Sarah. “I lived there till I was seven. My mother left when I was six, and my brother was five. It was 1930, the year after the crash. We moved a few months later to an apartment on Lake Street. I lived there until I married your grandfather. My father died that year. He never really recovered after the crash, and my mother left him.” It was an amazing story, the same one she had heard from Marjorie Merriweather about the family that had built the house on Scott Street. But more startling was the news that Mimi's mother had not died, but left. It was the first time Mimi had said it. Sarah wondered if her own mother knew the truth and never told her. Or if Mimi had lied to her, too.

“I never realized until I thought about it recently that I never knew your maiden name. You don't talk about your childhood,” Sarah said gently, grateful for her grandmother's candor now. Mimi looked uncharacteristically unhappy as she answered.

“It was de Beaumont. My childhood wasn't a happy time for me,” she said honestly, for the first time. “My mother disappeared, my father lost all his money. The governess I loved was sent away. It was all about loss, and losing people I had loved.” Sarah knew her brother had died during the war, which was how she had met the man she married. Sarah's grandfather had been Mimi's brother's best friend, and he had come to see them and bring them some of her brother's belongings. He and Mimi had fallen in love, and got married shortly after. That much Sarah knew, but she had never heard the earlier part of the story.

“What happened after she disappeared?” Sarah asked, touched that her grandmother was finally telling her what had happened. She didn't want to be invasive, but suddenly it had all become terribly important. The house that Stanley had lived in for seventy-six years, and that she was selling now for his estate, had been built by her great-grandfather for her great-grandmother. She had been in it dozens of times over the years to visit Stanley, and she had never suspected that it had a deep connection to her. And now, suddenly, she was fascinated by it and wanted to know all.

“I don't know much about what happened. No one ever spoke about her when I was a child, and I wasn't allowed to ask. It always upset my father. I don't think he ever recovered, from any of it. Divorce was a shocking thing in those days. I learned later that she left my father for another man, and went to live in France with him. He was a French marquis, and very dashing, I was told. They met at a diplomatic party and fell in love. Several years after my father died, I learned that she had died of pneumonia or tuberculosis during the war. I never saw her again after she left us, and my father would never speak of her to me. As a child I never knew why she disappeared, or what happened.”

And yet, with all that tragedy in her life, Mimi was one of the happiest people Sarah had ever known. Mimi had lost her entire family—mother, brother, father—at a remarkably young age, and the whole way of life she'd known as a young child. And yet she was cheerful, unassuming, and content, and brought joy to everyone. Sarah understood now why she had always said that she had been born on the day she got married. It had been a whole new life for her. Not as luxurious as the one she'd lived as a child, but it had been solid and stable and secure, with a man who loved her, and their child.

“I don't think my father ever really got over it,” Mimi went on. “I don't know if it was losing my mother, or the money, probably both. It must have been devastating for him, and totally humiliating, to have his wife leave him for another man, and worse yet, a year after the crash. They would have had to give up the house anyway, and I think they were selling things already then. After that, my father worked in a bank, and became a recluse for the rest of his life. I don't remember him ever going out socially, until he died fifteen years later. He died right after I got married. He built that house for my mother. I remember the house as though it was yesterday, or at least I think I do. I remember their parties in the ballroom.” There was a dreamy look in her eyes as she said it, and it was even more remarkable for Sarah, knowing she had been in that same ballroom, and her grandmother's childhood nursery, only the week before.

“Would you like to see the house again, Mimi?” Sarah asked softly. She could easily take her to visit it before they sold it. It wasn't going on the market until the following week, after the broker's open house on Tuesday after Thanksgiving. “I have the keys. I could take you there this weekend.” Mimi hesitated and then shook her head with a nostalgic expression.

“It sounds silly, but I think it might upset me. I don't like doing things that make me sad.” Sarah nodded. She had to respect that. She was so touched by the history her grandmother had finally shared with her, after all these years. “I went to see the château where she had lived with the marquis she married, when I was in Europe with your grandfather, after your mother was born. But it was all boarded up and deserted. I knew she had died by then, but I just wanted to see where she had lived after she left us. The locals said her husband, the marquis, had died during the war as well. In the Resistance. They had no children. I wondered if I might find someone who knew her, some small piece of information or history about her. But no one knew anything, and neither your grandfather nor I spoke French. They just said the marquis had died, and she did, too. My father died around the same time she did, oddly. He always acted as though she had died, from the moment she left. And that is what I always told people when I was growing up. It was simpler. I told your mother that too.” Mimi looked apologetic for the lie, and Sarah's heart went out to her as she listened. What a tragedy it had been for Mimi. Sarah was grateful that Mimi had decided to finally tell her the truth. It felt like a gift.

“How awful for you,” Sarah said sadly. She put her arms around Mimi and gave her a hug. She couldn't even imagine what those years had been like for her. Losing her mother, her father's years of depression, and then to lose her only brother in the war. He had been killed at Iwo Jima, which she had always said had been the fatal blow for her father. He died less than a year later. Mimi had lost the last of her family, nearly at one gulp. And now, almost mysteriously, the house her great-grandfather had built had drifted into Sarah's life, bringing all its history and secrets with it.

“What's going on here?” Audrey asked sharply, as she walked into her mother's bedroom and saw Sarah give Mimi a hug. Audrey was always slightly jealous of the warm, easy relationship her mother and her daughter shared. Her relationship with Sarah was much more tense.

“We're just talking,” Mimi said, turning to smile at her daughter.

“About what?”

“My parents, actually,” Mimi said simply, as Audrey stared.

“You never talk about that, Mother. What brought that up?” Audrey had stopped questioning her mother about her childhood years before.

“I'm selling her parents' house for an estate,” Sarah explained. “It's a beautiful old house, although not in very good shape. It hasn't been touched since it was built.” Mimi drifted out of the room then, to look for George. They'd said enough.

“You didn't upset her, did you?” Audrey asked her daughter conspiratorially. “You know she doesn't like to talk about that stuff.” Audrey had heard rumors that her grandmother had abandoned her mother as a child, but Mimi never confirmed it and she knew very little else. As a result of handling Stanley's estate, Sarah now knew far more.

“I may have,” Sarah said honestly. “I tried not to. I found a photograph of her mother in the house this week. I didn't know who it was, but I realized I'd seen it somewhere before. I just saw it on her dresser.” She pulled the photograph of Lilli out and showed her mother. She didn't want to share her grandmother's confidences until Mimi said she could, or chose to do so herself.

“How strange.” Audrey looked pensive and then put it back. “I hope Mimi's not too upset.”

But when they walked back into the living room, Mimi seemed to have regained her composure, and was having an animated conversation with George. He was teasing the three ladies surrounding him, listening raptly, but his gaze was firmly attached to Mimi. He clearly had a soft spot for her. And she appeared to enjoy him as well.

Sarah finally left an hour later. Audrey stayed for a few more minutes, and then said she was meeting a friend. She didn't invite Sarah to join her, but Sarah wouldn't have anyway. She had a lot to think about, and wanted to be alone in her apartment to digest what her grandmother had shared. When she walked in, and saw the dirty dishes on the kitchen counter, the unmade bed, the laundry on her bathroom floor, she realized what her mother meant about her apartment. The place really was a shambles. It was dirty, dark, depressing. There were no curtains, the venetian blinds were broken. There were old wine stains on the carpet, and the couch she'd dragged through her life since college should have been thrown out years before.