Chapter 3: What the Letter Actually Said
I stepped back from the door and walked to the kitchen.
She followed me.
"We're not done," she said.
"I know."
I pulled out a chair and sat down.
She stayed standing.
The letter was still in her hand, slightly crumpled from where she'd been gripping it.
"Sit down, Sienna."
"I don't want to sit down.
I want you to explain why a law firm is writing to you about your uncle's estate and why I'm finding out from a forwarded envelope."
"Because you left," I said.
"Three days ago.
Remember?"
Her jaw tightened.
"That's not a reason to hide something this significant."
"I didn't hide it.
I found out the same day you walked out.
I was going to tell you that night." I looked at her.
"You weren't here."
She set the letter on the table between us.
"How much?"
I didn't answer right away.
"How much?" she said again, louder.
"Sienna, my uncle passed away.
He was seventy-one years old and he raised me for four years after my parents divorced.
Can we start there?"
Something moved across her face.
Not quite guilt.
Close to it, but not quite.
"I'm sorry about your uncle," she said, quieter.
"But I need to know what this means for us."
"There is no us right now.
You made that clear."
"Don't be dramatic."
"You packed a suitcase."
She pulled out the chair across from me and sat down.
"I was upset.
I reacted."
"You said you married a provider, not a problem."
She didn't repeat it.
That was the closest she ever came to taking something back.
I reached across the table and turned the letter to face me.
I'd already read it twice the morning it arrived.
I knew exactly what it said.
My uncle, Gerald, had left me his house — a three-bedroom property in Vermont he'd owned outright for twenty years — and a savings account with a balance I still hadn't fully absorbed.
The letter didn't list a number.
It asked me to contact the firm to discuss the terms of the estate.
"The letter doesn't say an amount," I said.
"It asks me to call them."
"Then call them.
Right now.
I'll wait."
I looked at her across the table.
The woman I'd spent six years building a life with.
The woman who had walked out the door forty-eight hours after I lost my job without asking a single question about how I was doing.
"No," I said.
Her eyes narrowed.
"Excuse me?"
"I'm not calling them while you sit here waiting to calculate your share."
She stood up.
"That is not what I'm doing."
"Then tell me what you're doing, Sienna.
Because from where I'm sitting, you left when things got hard and came back when you thought things got easy.
So help me understand what I'm missing."
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
The kitchen was very quiet.
Her phone buzzed on the counter.
She glanced at it, then back at me.
"Who is that?" I asked.
May you like
"No one."
But she picked it up faster than she needed to, and turned the screen away before she set it back down.
