Chapter 23

His mother had always valued stylish handwriting. She hadn’t taught him, but she’d said in interviews and to her writing students that penmanship was an art, and the sign of an artist with words. Some of Lydia Sable-Kent’s students had found this pretentious. Some had nodded eagerly. Younger Colby, sitting on back staircases and eavesdropping on his mother’s gilded salons, had come away with the impression that graceful letters might make her smile.

When he’d finally shown her a version of her own name in onyx ink over creamy heavy paper, the one he’d thought had come out the best, she’d corrected the curve of the yin her first name and told him he could certainly do better if he kept trying.

He hadn’t shown her again. But he had kept trying.