Chapter 10
"But you knew about the rentals."
"Yes."
One word.
Quietly spoken.
And it changed the shape of everything I thought I understood about the last four months.
I stood in the hallway of the house where I had watched her grow up, where we had weathered snowstorms together and eaten Thanksgiving dinner by the fire, and I held my phone with both hands because one wasn't enough to keep it steady.
"I need you to come up here," I said.
"Today."
"Mom, I have plans this afternoon—"
"Cancel them." I hadn't used that tone with her since she was seventeen.
"Come up here, and bring Connor.
This conversation needs to happen in person."
I ended the call before she could negotiate.
Richard was still at the kitchen counter when I came back.
He had refilled his water glass.
He watched me set my phone down on the counter beside the folder.
"She's coming," I said.
He nodded slowly, and for the first time since I had walked through my own front door that morning, he looked like a man who understood the ground had shifted.
"I want you to stay," I said.
"I want you here when she arrives.
And I want Connor here too."
"Connor's at a golf thing in Coeur d'Alene."
"Then he can leave early." I picked up the folder.
"Call him."
Richard didn't move.
"Call him, Richard.
Or I make a different call first, and then none of us will be having a family conversation this afternoon."
He reached for his phone.
* * *
# CHAPTER 6: When They All Sat Down
Connor arrived forty minutes after Madison.
He walked in still wearing his golf shoes, which left small marks on my entryway tile.
He was thirty-six, broad-shouldered, with the particular ease of a man who had never been seriously confronted about anything in his life.
He looked around the room — at his father sitting on the sofa, at Madison perched on the edge of the armchair with her hands folded, at me standing near the kitchen counter with the folder in front of me — and he smiled.
May you like
"So," he said lightly.
"Family meeting."
