Chapter 7: What Vivienne Did Next
We found the step exactly as she remembered it.
The crack down the middle had widened over the years, and moss had grown into it, dark green against the gray stone.
The garden behind the house was overgrown but you could still see its original shape — raised beds along the fence, a path through the center, an apple tree at the far end that had gone unpruned for years and spread its branches wide.
Vivienne stood on the step and looked at the tree.
"She made jam," she said.
"Every September.
The whole kitchen smelled like it for days."
I stood beside her.
The cold was sharp but the wind had dropped.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
Not about the jam.
About the house.
"I don't know yet," I said.
"I've had it for less than twenty-four hours."
"It's in good condition.
Structurally, I mean.
I had a look on the way through." She said it in a practical tone, the way she might discuss anything.
"The roof looks recent.
The windows are double-glazed.
Someone's been maintaining it."
"Thomas hired a local firm.
The lawyer told me."
She nodded.
Looked at the apple tree.
"I owe you an apology," she said.
"A real one.
Not because Dad asked me to.
Because it's the truth." She turned to face me.
"I treated you badly for twenty years.
I made your life in that family harder than it needed to be.
I told people things about you that weren't fair.
I went to the accountant." She met my eyes.
"I'm sorry, Ellie.
I mean that."
I had waited a long time to hear something like that.
I had stopped expecting it years ago.
"I know you do," I said.
"That's not the same as accepting it."
"No," I said.
"It's not."
She nodded.
She didn't push for more.
That was new.
We went back inside and I made tea from the supplies Thomas had left in the kitchen — a box of teabags, a carton of long-life milk, two mugs on the counter as if he'd known there would be two of us.
Maybe he had.
We sat at the table with the dust sheet pulled off, and we drank our tea, and Vivienne told me things about Thomas I hadn't known.
Small things.
The way he used to whistle off-key when he was concentrating.
The fact that he'd been terrified of birds as a child and never entirely got over it.
The trip they'd taken when she was sixteen, just the two of them, to Scotland, and how he'd gotten them lost on a hiking trail and refused to admit it for two hours.
I told her things too.
The way he'd proposed — badly, nervously, dropping the ring and then laughing at himself until I laughed too.
The book he reread every year.
The way he'd held my hand in the hospital during the diagnosis and said, "We'll be all right," and somehow made me believe it.
We were there for three hours.
When Vivienne stood to leave, she picked up her coat and then stopped.
"I have something to tell you," she said.
"Something I should have told you before the will reading.
Before any of this." She set her coat back down.
"The meeting with the accountant — it wasn't just me."
I looked at her.
"My husband encouraged it.
Pushed it, actually.
He's the one who found the other lawyer.
He's the one who drafted the letter suggesting Dad lacked capacity." She said it steadily, but her hands weren't quite still.
"I went along with it.
That's on me.
But it wasn't only my idea."
"What does your husband want?"
She looked at the table.
"He's been in financial trouble for about two years.
He thought — we thought — that if the will was challenged and I inherited more, it would solve the problem." She looked up.
"I'm not telling you this to shift the blame.
I'm telling you because you should know the full picture.
And because I think he may not be finished."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"What do you mean, not finished?"
"He doesn't know I came here today.
He doesn't know what was in my father's letter." She picked up her coat again.
"But he knows about the blue house.
I mentioned it once, months ago, when Dad said something about it in passing.
I didn't think anything of it then."
She looked at me directly.
"Lock the doors tonight, Ellie.
And call the lawyer first thing in the morning."
She left before I could answer.
I stood in Miriam's kitchen with my empty mug and listened to her car start and pull away down Calloway Lane.
Then I took out my phone and found the lawyer's number.
May you like
It was nearly five o'clock.
I called anyway.
