“But in her twenty-second year, more than a year after Chase and Pearl announced their engagement, she walked the sandy lane, blistering with heat, to the mailbox every day and looked inside. Finally one morning, she found a bulky manila envelope and slid the contents – an advance copy of The Sea Shells of the Eastern Seaboard, by Catherine Danielle Clark – into her hands. She breathed in, no one to show it to.”
