“Your father,” he said, handing me a cream envelope with my name written in shaky blue ink, “would have been very proud of your timing.”
My chest tightened at the sight of his handwriting. “Did he really change everything last week?”
“The night he got the investigator’s report,” Blackwood said. “He made me drive over at two in the morning. I have not forgiven him for the timing, but I respect the style.”
I opened the envelope right there, with funeral guests and reporters and sunlight and my whole ruined marriage humming around me.
My darling Natalie, the letter began. If Blackwood has just detonated the bomb I left in my will, then your husband is learning what it means to stand on his own legs without leaning on mine.
I swallowed hard and kept reading.
He wrote that he was sorry he wouldn’t be there to see Grant’s face. He wrote that pain was weather, not geography—that I was not required to live inside it forever. He wrote that the yacht was mine now and that when I was ready, I should take her out beyond the harbor and let the wind do some of the talking.
At the bottom, beneath All my love, Dad, there was a postscript.
P.S. Check the safe in my study. Combination is your birthday. I left something else for you.
I read that line twice.
Because my father had already shattered my funeral. Which meant whatever was waiting in that safe had to be something even bigger.
And suddenly, in the middle of all that sunlight, I realized the funeral might only have been the opening move.
Part 4
By the time the reception started in the parish hall, I was already leaving.
People tried to stop me—clients of my father’s with damp eyes, women from the auxiliary committee holding paper plates of tea sandwiches, cousins who wanted details before they offered condolences—but I didn’t have room for anybody else’s curiosity. Grief had one hand around my throat. Adrenaline had the other. The only thing I wanted was the safe in my father’s study.
I made my statement to the reporter because she caught me halfway to my car and because Dad would have hated me letting someone else control the story.
“My father protected his family until his last breath,” I told her. “Today was about honoring his life. If the truth embarrassed anyone, that speaks to their choices, not mine.”
She asked about Grant.
“Soon-to-be ex-husband,” I said.
Then I got in the car and drove home.