I drew her close against me and rose to my feet.

I didn't meet him alone.

But I did call him back.

Margaret had advised against any contact, but something in his message had lodged in me like a splinter — I know things about your mother — and I had spent two nights not sleeping properly because of it.

I needed to know what he thought he had.

I needed to hear him say it.

I called from Margaret's office, with her sitting across from me and the call on speaker and her phone recording every word.

Richard answered immediately.

"I wasn't sure you'd call," he said.

"What do you know about my mother?"

A pause.

The sound of him settling into something.

"Dorothy had a life before she met my father," he said.

"Before she had you and Daniel.

Things she never told either of you."

"Everyone has a life before," I said.

"That's not a secret."

"She had a child," Richard said.

"Before Daniel.

Before you.

A daughter she gave up.

She was nineteen.

The father was married.

She never told anyone — not my father, not you, not Daniel." Another pause.

"I found out two years before she passed.

She asked me not to tell you.

She was ashamed.

She thought it would change how you saw her."

The room was very still.

"And you're telling me now," I said, "because you think it changes something about the house."

"I'm telling you because you deserve to know the full picture.

Your mother wasn't the woman you think she was.

She made choices.

She kept secrets.

And the arrangement she made with me regarding the property was part of trying to make things right — with me, with my father's memory, with the family she'd built."

"That's a very convenient story," I said.

"It's the truth."

"Then you'll have no problem providing documentation.

A birth record.

Adoption papers.

Anything." I kept my voice even.

"Because if it's true, it's a matter of public record.

And if it's not—"

"Emma." His voice sharpened.

"I'm trying to give you a way out of this that doesn't destroy your mother's reputation in open court."

"You're trying to make me feel like I didn't know her.

So that I doubt myself.

So that I wonder if maybe she really did want you to have the house." I looked at Margaret across the desk.

She gave a small, steady nod.

"It won't work, Richard."

"You're making a mistake."

"The injunction holds.

The full hearing is in six weeks.

If you have evidence of this child, bring it.

If you have evidence of a verbal agreement, bring it.

Bring all of it." I paused.

"And Richard — stop sending messages from unknown numbers.

We have all of them."

Silence.

"You recorded this call," he said.

"Goodbye, Richard."

I ended the call.

Margaret stopped the recording and set her phone down.

"Well," she said.

"Is it possible?" I asked.

"That my mother had another child?"

"It's possible," Margaret said carefully.

"It's also a classic destabilization tactic.

He introduces something you can't immediately disprove, something emotionally charged, something that makes you feel like the ground has shifted."

"But if it's true—"

"If it's true, it has no legal bearing on the deed.

Your mother's prior history does not affect the validity of a registered property document." Margaret looked at me.

"But I understand why it matters to you personally."

I sat with that for a moment.

My mother.

Nineteen years old.

A married man.

A child she gave up.

Had she tried to tell me?

Emma, there are things I should have told you sooner.

Maybe.

Maybe that was it.

Or maybe Richard had invented it entirely, and I was doing exactly what he wanted — sitting in a solicitor's office, doubting my mother, losing my footing.

"How do I find out if it's true?" I asked.

"Birth records are public after a certain period," Margaret said.

"If a child was born and adopted, there will be a record.

I can have a researcher look into it — discreetly, quickly." She paused.

"Do you want to know?"

I thought about my mother's face.

The tin of biscuits on the second shelf.

The yellow kitchen.

The roses along the south wall.

"Yes," I said.

"I want to know.

But it doesn't change anything about the house."

"No," Margaret agreed.

"It doesn't."

She made a note.

I drove home through the January dark, and I thought about a nineteen-year-old girl I had never known, who had become the woman who raised me, who had kept a secret for sixty years, who had tried to tell me something in the last weeks of her life and run out of time.

Whatever she had done, she had loved me.

I knew that the way I knew my own name.

Richard could not take that from me.

But when I pulled into my driveway and saw a car parked across the street that I didn't recognize, engine running, no one getting out, I sat in my own car for a long moment before I went inside.