The Hollis crates arrived smelling like someone else's attic.
Alicia unpacked them alone, which she preferred, kneeling on the library floor with a list in one hand and a dead woman's belongings in the other.
Mrs. Hollis had died in January.
Her family gave the books to God because nobody in the family wanted to read them, which was, Alicia thought, a fairly honest way to be religious.
Bibles. Hymnals.
A water-stained copy of Pilgrim's Progress. Then, near the bottom, wrapped in a shawl like it was something worth protecting, a stack of letters tied with ribbon gone the color of weak tea.
She should have set them aside for Father Roman to sort.
Personal correspondence usually got burned, on the theory that dead women's secrets weren't the convent's business.
She read the top one anyway.
My dearest I count the days until you're home, and hate myself a little for counting them at all, since you always say a good wife shouldn't need her husband so badly. I can't help it. I was made wanting things, I think, and you are the thing I want.
Alicia sat with that sentence longer than she meant to.
She had been made wanting things too. Nobody had ever put it that plainly, like it was just a fact about a person, the way some people were made tall.
Her own mother would have called it a character flaw. Had called it one, in fact, more than once, back when Alicia still lived in a house with a mother in it.
She hadn't thought about that house in a while.
She let herself, for exactly as long as it took to refold the shawl.
Four years old. Her mother crying in the kitchen with the door not quite shut, and Alicia standing in the hallway listening, understanding maybe one word in five, but understanding the shape of it. That her mother had wanted something, and wanting it had cost her something else, and the losing had been the mother's fault, everyone agreed, even her mother.
By six, Alicia had made herself a private rule: want quietly, or don't want at all.
She'd kept that rule for thirteen years. It was, she sometimes thought, the only reason St. Agatha's had taken her. Not because she had a calling, whatever a calling was supposed to feel like, but because she was already so well trained in wanting nothing out loud that the vows barely changed anything.
She tied the ribbon back around the letters and set them on the shelf reserved for things Father Roman would decide about later.
Then, because the room was empty and nobody would ever know, she read the letter one more time.
I was made wanting things, I think.
She put it down before she could decide whether she agreed.
The chapel bell rang for Sext. Alicia stood, brushed the dust off her knees, and went, because that was what the rest of the day required of her, regardless of what the letters had required of her instead.
Sister Josepha caught her in the corridor.
"You look pale."
"I'm fine."
"You always say that." Josepha said it without judgment, just an observation, the way she said most things. "You've got dust on your sleeve."
Alicia brushed it off.
"Old letters," she said, by way of explanation, though Josepha hadn't asked for one.
"From the Hollis crates?"
"Mm."
"Don't read them," Josepha said. Not sharply. Almost gently. "It never does any good, reading a dead woman's wailings."
Alicia looked at her surprised.
Josepha only shrugged like she'd said something about the weather and continued down the hall toward the kitchens leaving Alicia to wonder.