The little brass key was still taped to the lid, in an envelope in her mother's handwriting. For Patsy, when you're ready.
Patsy sat on the edge of her bed with the hatbox in her lap for a long time.
Then she opened it.
There was no hat inside. There were cards.
Birthday cards, dozens of them, tied in bundles with faded blue ribbon. The kind you buy at a drugstore, with flowers and lambs and little girls in bonnets on the front. Patsy untied the first bundle with shaking hands.
Every card was signed. None of them had ever been mailed. And every one said the same thing inside, in her mother's quick, slanting hand, with only the number changing.
To my April girl, on your first birthday. I think of you every day. Your Mother.
To my April girl, on your second birthday.
To my April girl, on your tenth. I hope they're good to you. I hope you know how to laugh.
Patsy counted them. There were fifty-three.
The last one said, To my April girl, on your fifty-third birthday, and the date on the back was April 9, 1999. Her mother had died that October.
At the bottom of the box, under the last bundle, was a hospital bracelet, the tiny kind they put on newborns. It said Sullivan, Girl, 4/9/46.
Patsy put her hand over her mouth and sat there on the bed and cried for her mother, and for a sister she had never known, and for every April 9 she'd watched her mother walk to the early Mass alone.
She called Ann Feeney that afternoon.
Kathleen had wanted to be there, to make sure it wasn't a scam. Patsy told her no. Some calls you make alone.
The voice that answered was older than Patsy's, a little hoarse, with an upstate New York flatness to it. But when Ann laughed, nervously, at something Patsy said, Patsy had to sit down.
It was her mother's laugh. The big one that filled a church hall.
They talked for three hours.
Ann had been a nurse for forty years. She'd married a man named Bill Feeney, who'd died in 2015, and she had four sons and eleven grandchildren.
Her adoptive parents had loved her and had never hidden that she was adopted. She'd started looking for her birth mother in 1976 and hit a wall every single time, because Massachusetts kept those records sealed.
Until 2022.
"I always wondered why," Ann said. "Why she gave me away. I made up stories. I thought maybe she didn't want me."
"She wanted you," Patsy said. "Ann, I've got something I need to show you."
Patsy found the rest of the story in a letter, folded flat at the very bottom of the hatbox, under the bracelet. Her mother had written it in 1990, addressed to "my girls," and never given it to anyone.
Peg Sullivan had been nineteen in the summer of 1945, working at the mill. Jack Riordan was twenty-one, home on leave before shipping out to the Pacific.
They'd been sweethearts since high school. He'd asked her to marry him on the last night of his leave, and she'd said yes, and he'd left the next morning.
She found out she was expecting in September. Jack was on the other side of the world, and the mail took months.
Her parents were ashamed. They sent her to a home run by the Sisters in Springfield, where girls in her situation went, and they told the neighbors she was caring for a sick aunt.
The baby was born in April. The Sisters told Peg the baby would have a better life with a married couple, and that she had no right to keep her.
She signed the papers on the fourth day. She was nineteen, and alone, and she believed them.
Jack came home in the spring of 1947. She told him everything.
He went straight to the Sisters to get their daughter back, and they told him she'd already been adopted and the records were sealed by the state. He never stopped regretting it.
They were married in June. They had Patsy a year later. And they never told her, because they couldn't bear to.
Ann drove down from Troy on a Saturday in May, with one of her sons at the wheel.
Patsy met them at St. Jerome's Cemetery, at the top of the hill above the river, where her mother and father were buried side by side under a gray granite stone.
Patsy knew her the second she got out of the car. Ann was a little taller, a little heavier, with short white hair.
But she had their father's nose. And she had Peg Riordan's eyes.
Neither of them said anything at first. They just held on to each other at the top of the hill while Ann's son and Patsy's grandson stood back by the cars and looked at their shoes.
Then they sat down on the bench beside the grave, and Patsy put the hatbox between them, and they opened the cards together. One by one, from the first birthday to the fifty-third.
Ann read each one out loud. Patsy listened.
When they got to the tenth one, Ann stopped.
"I hope you know how to laugh," she read. Her voice cracked. Then, before she could help it, she laughed. That big laugh, the one that filled a church hall, out across the cemetery in the spring sunshine.
Patsy laughed too. She couldn't help it either.
They sat there on the bench beside their mother's grave, two white-haired sisters with the same nose and the same laugh, holding fifty-three birthday cards that had finally been delivered.