Chapter 3: What the Note Said
The note had seven words.
*Go to the blue house.
Tell no one.*
I folded it back along its crease and closed my fingers around it.
The lawyer was watching me.
Vivienne was watching me.
Thomas's brother, Gerald, sat in the corner with his hands on his knees, watching me too.
I put the note in my pocket.
"Well?" Vivienne's voice had an edge that could cut glass.
"What does it say?"
"It's personal."
"Personal." She repeated the word like it tasted wrong.
"He was my father.
Nothing he wrote is personal from me."
The lawyer set down his folder.
"Ms.
Vivienne, the envelope was addressed to Mrs.
Ellie.
Its contents are legally hers."
She turned on him.
"And who decided that?
You?
Some document my father signed when he was sick and not thinking clearly?"
"He signed the updated will fourteen months ago," the lawyer said.
"He was assessed by two physicians before signing.
His thinking was entirely clear."
That landed.
I saw it in her face — a small flinch she couldn't quite hide.
Gerald shifted in his corner chair.
He was Thomas's younger brother, quieter than Thomas had ever been, with the same dark eyes and the same habit of pressing his lips together when he was holding something back.
He'd barely spoken since we arrived.
"Vivienne," he said quietly.
"Let the man finish."
She looked at him like he'd slapped her.
"You stay out of this, Gerald."
"I'm trying to."
The lawyer opened the folder.
He read the will in the careful, measured tone of someone who had done this many times and understood that the words he was reading would change the people in the room.
Thomas had left the house to me.
The savings account to me.
His personal library, his watch collection, his car.
To Vivienne, he had left one thing.
A letter.
The lawyer slid a sealed envelope across the table toward her.
Her name on the front, in Thomas's handwriting, just like mine.
She stared at it.
"That's all?"
"That is what the will specifies for you, yes."
"He left her everything and he left me a letter?" Her voice cracked on the last word.
Not from grief.
From something harder than grief.
"Vivienne—" I started.
"Don't." She stood up so fast her chair scraped back against the floor.
"Don't you say a single word to me.
You did this.
Twenty years of working on him, and you finally got what you came for."
I kept my voice level.
"I didn't know what was in the will."
"Of course you didn't." She grabbed the envelope from the table without opening it and pushed past the lawyer's assistant toward the door.
She stopped with her hand on the frame.
Didn't turn around.
"The blue house," she said.
"I heard him say that to you once.
Years ago.
I never knew what it meant."
She walked out.
The room was very quiet.
Gerald was still in his chair.
He looked at the table, then at me.
"Do you know what it means?" he asked.
"Not yet," I said.
"But I'm going to find out."
He nodded slowly.
Then he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and set something on the table between us.
A photograph.
Old, slightly creased.
Two people standing in front of a small house painted pale blue, laughing at whoever was holding the camera.
One of them was Thomas.
Young, maybe thirty.
The other was a woman I had never seen before.
"He made me promise not to show you that until after today," Gerald said.
"I think it's time you knew."
My hand moved toward the photograph.
Gerald didn't stop me.
"Who is she?" I asked.
May you like
He pressed his lips together the way Thomas used to.
"That," he said, "is why he needed you to wear the coat."
