🥧 The Forty Pies Before Sunrise

Chapter 06 - June’s Locket

Rowan had worn her mother’s locket for less than a day, and already it felt heavier than any jewelry had a right to be.

It rested against her chest while she sat at the police station, while Lila gave her statement again, while Officer Chen made copies of the letter from the coffee can using gloved hands and a tenderness Rowan had not expected from a government copier.

Forgive me, Mama.

That was all the envelope had said on the outside.

Inside, June Price had written three pages in blue ink, slanted hard to the right, the way Rowan’s own handwriting did when she was tired.

Mama,

If Robert gives you this, it means I was wrong about him.

Rowan had read that sentence twelve times and still felt it enter her body like cold water.

June had written the letter two weeks after Rowan’s birth. She had been living with Robert in a rented trailer outside Ashland, scared and stubborn and too proud to admit she missed home. She wrote that Warren had visited. Warren, then twenty-two, already handling pieces of the Whitfield business no one trusted him with. He had warned June that Agnes would never forgive her for marrying beneath herself.

He had said Agnes had burned the baby blanket June sent.

He had brought proof: a charred corner of pink flannel with the Whitfield wheat stitched in silver thread.

Rowan stared at that line until her eyes hurt.

Because inside the locket, folded smaller than a communion wafer, was a scrap of the same pink flannel.

Not burned.

Perfectly preserved.

“Warren lied to both sides,” Officer Chen said.

They sat in a small interview room with gray walls and vending machine coffee cooling between them. Lila had fallen asleep with her head on Rowan’s shoulder, exhausted by truth.

Harris stood near the door, arms folded. “The question is why.”

Agnes answered from a speakerphone placed in the center of the table. Her voice sounded thin, but alert. “Money, darling. It is almost always money until pride makes it uglier.”

Rowan closed her eyes.

Agnes had refused to return to Room 214 after the lobby confrontation. With Officer Chen’s help, she had been moved temporarily to a hospital observation unit for evaluation. Not because she was unstable.

Because St. Jude no longer felt safe.

“What money?” Rowan asked.

“The Whitfield land,” Agnes said. “Two hundred acres, an orchard, mineral rights beneath the ridge, and a development company that has wanted all of it since 1998.”

Lila stirred. “For houses?”

“Luxury lake estates,” Agnes said. “Gated, ugly, and priced for people who think trees are decorations.”

Despite everything, Rowan smiled.

Agnes heard it. “You have June’s laugh.”

The smile broke apart.

Rowan pressed her fingers to the locket. “My father told me you were cruel to her.”

“I was,” Agnes said.

The room went quiet.

That was not what Rowan expected.

Agnes continued, voice steadier now. “I was proud. I wanted her to finish college. I wanted her to marry someone who adored her without needing to own her. I said hard things. A mother can be right and still be unkind about it.”

Rowan looked down at Lila asleep against her.

“I wrote her letters,” Agnes said. “They came back. Then Robert called and said June wanted no contact. He said if I loved her, I would leave her alone.”

“And you believed him?” Rowan asked, sharper than she meant.

Agnes absorbed it. “For three months. Then I went looking.”

Harris leaned forward. “What did you find?”

“An empty trailer. A neighbor said June had gone to the hospital with a fever and never came home. Robert told the sheriff’s deputy she died. He had paperwork.”

“My father had her death certificate,” Rowan whispered.

“Did you ever see it closely?” Agnes asked.

Rowan had not.

She remembered a folder Robert kept locked in his truck. She remembered him taking it out once when a school asked for records. She remembered seeing her mother’s name and the black stamp that made a child stop asking questions.

Agnes said, “I hired people. Warren handled some of it because he was family and because I was foolish enough to trust blood. After a while he brought me a report saying June’s baby had died too.”

Lila woke fully. “Me and Mom were both supposed to be dead?”

Agnes’s voice broke. “Yes, sweetheart.”

Rowan stood and walked to the small window. The parking lot outside was full of ordinary cars belonging to ordinary people having ordinary days. A woman lifted groceries into a trunk. A man argued with a parking meter. The world had the nerve to continue.

Officer Harris’s phone buzzed. He read the message, then looked at Rowan.

“What?” she asked.

“The hospital where June supposedly died closed in 2001. Records were transferred to the state archive.”

“And?”

“They found the file.”

Rowan gripped the back of the chair.

Harris hesitated, and that hesitation became its own weather.

“June Price was admitted under her married name,” he said. “But the death certificate your father used was not issued by that hospital.”

Rowan could not speak.

Lila stood and reached for her hand.

Harris’s voice lowered. “There’s more. The attending nurse listed in the file is still alive. Her name is Miriam Kline.”

Agnes made a sound over the speakerphone.