“She means working.”

“Philosophy is work. And I also have a job.” By this, Jess meant her part-time job at Yorick’s, the rare-book store on Channing where she did her reading in the afternoons.

“I don’t mean a job—” Emily read, and then stopped short. “She knew what you were going to say.”

Jess giggled, because Emily treated the letters like such oracles.

“I don’t mean a job. I am talking about a career, and a vocation. George Eliot wrote ‘that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life’—but that was more than one hundred years ago. I’m hoping that you and your sister will set your sights a little higher.” A little higher, Emily thought, as she placed the letter on the bed, and yet Gillian had been a mother, no more, no less. Would she have done more if she had lived? Much more? Or just a little? Jess was sorting through her mail on the floor. “You aren’t even listening,” Emily accused her.

“Yes, I am. Things are not so ill with you and me.”

“You never take these letters seriously.”

“I do! Of course I do. I’ve read them all—lots of times.”

Emily was shocked. “All of them? Up to the end?”

“Yeah, I read them all at once when I was twelve.”

“You did not!” Emily had always looked forward to her birthday letters and missed them now. Gillian had only written them up to age twenty-five. “That’s just wrong.”

“Why? She never said you have to wait for your birthday every year.”

“But that was the intent!”

Jess considered this. “Maybe. I just opened all of mine at once. Then I got into Dad’s computer and opened the WordPerfect files.”

“Why would you do something like that?” The idea was foreign to Emily. Not only dishonorable, but self-defeating, like peeking to see how a book ends. “Didn’t you feel bad?”