He looked at me then. Not angrily. Not apologetically either. Almost pleadingly. As though I might still choose to help him preserve the version of events in which he had merely been passive instead of complicit.
“You have to understand how things were at the time,” he said.
I stared at him. “No. You have to understand how things are now.”
A muscle moved in his jaw.
He came into the kitchen and pulled out a chair opposite me without asking. For a second I was thrown backward in time by the sound of those chair legs scraping tile. That was how childhood arguments began here: someone sitting down heavily, choosing a position, preparing to explain why your feelings were regrettable but misplaced.
“Your mother was very ill,” he said. “She became… determined about certain things.”
“Determined,” I repeated.
“She was angry with Diana.”
“She was accurate about Diana.”
He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Rebecca.”
I leaned forward. “Did you know the house was mine?”
His silence lasted just long enough to answer before the words came. “I knew it was in trust.”
“For me.”
“Yes.”
There it was. No courtroom required. No loophole. No fog of misunderstanding. Just yes.
Somewhere in the distance a gull screamed. The sound cut through the window and was gone.
“You let her tell police I was trespassing,” I said.
“I didn’t know she had done that.”
“Did you know she changed the locks?”
He looked away.
I laughed softly, because of course he had.
“Thomas,” Evelyn said, voice precise now, “I strongly advise you not to continue down any path that requires us to prove your awareness piece by piece.”
He snapped. Not loudly, but enough to show the temper he spent most of his life pressing flat for public use. “I am not the villain you’re trying to make me.”
“No?” I asked.
“No.” He turned to me fully. “I was trying to keep the peace.”
The phrase landed like a match in a room full of dry paper.
My mother’s letter flashed through me.
There is a difference between peace and quiet.