Chương 3
“My business card.”
“Which business?”
“Emily, for God’s sake.”
Frank walked toward his own car. “Your mother and I are going home.”
Carol stared at him. “Our condo is under renovation.”
“It has one working bedroom.”
“The bathrooms are torn apart.”
“One bathroom is torn apart.”
“There is dust everywhere.”
Frank opened the driver’s door. “Then we’ll sleep in dust.”
Carol looked at David, perhaps expecting rescue. He was reading something on his phone with his shoulders hunched.
“David?” she said.
He did not look up.
Carol’s mouth tightened. She climbed into Frank’s car.
Emily stood between the trucks while her family divided itself into vehicles.
The workers continued loading boxes.
The villa behind them had already begun to look less like hers. Curtains had been removed from the guest room. A patio table stood bare where Carol’s orchid pots had been. Through the open front doors, Emily could see the pale square on the foyer wall where she had hung an abstract painting Eleanor disliked.
She thought of her father sitting beneath that square years earlier, lacing his shoes before his morning walk. Thomas Vale had never hurried the loops. Even after cancer weakened his fingers, he tied each shoe twice. When Emily complained that he was making them late, he would say, “Then we’ll arrive as people who know how to tie their shoes.”
She had found the line irritating until the year he died.
The bronze plaque remained in her hand.
David came beside her. “Give me the papers.”
“No.”
“We need to know what she filed.”
“I can read.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It sounded like what you meant.”
He exhaled and changed his face. The impatience loosened. His voice lowered into the warm register he used when apologizing without admitting fault.
“Em. Look at me.”
She did.
“This is ugly. Your mother wanted it ugly. She knew exactly what she was doing by putting that envelope in front of everyone.”
“So you did sign it.”
“I did not say that.”
“Did she authorize you?”
“She asked me to manage the house.”
“When?”
“After your father died.”
“She barely spoke to you after Dad died.”
“That isn’t true.”
“It is.”
“You were grieving. You don’t remember half of what happened.”
He said it gently.
That gentleness frightened her more than the anger had.
Emily placed the plaque on top of the papers and walked toward her car.
David followed. “Where are you going?”
“To the hotel.”
“I’ll drive.”
“I have my own car.”
“We should arrive together.”
“Why?”
He stopped.
She waited for an answer.
A worker pushed a dolly between them, its wheels squeaking beneath a tower of boxes. Emily stepped aside. David did not, and the worker had to angle around him.
“Because we’re married,” David said.
The sentence sounded less like comfort than a reminder of jurisdiction.
Emily drove to the Royal Palm alone.
The hotel lobby smelled of citrus and cold air-conditioning. A wedding party occupied half the seating area. Women in matching robes carried iced coffees toward the elevators while a photographer arranged shoes on a velvet chair. Emily stood at the desk with the memorial plaque wrapped in a hotel towel, her mother’s documents beneath one arm, and no overnight bag because the blue vehicle by the curb had left before she thought to collect it.
The clerk could not find a reservation under her name.
She called David.
He answered on the sixth ring.
“It’s under Mercer Development Group.”
“The company that closed?”
“It did not close.”
“The office is empty.”
“We moved operations.”
“To where?”
“Emily, hand the clerk your ID.”
“I already did.”
“Then wait.”
The clerk looked politely away.
After four minutes, the reservation appeared. One room. Two nights. A deposit had been paid with a card ending in numbers Emily did not recognize.
She took the key and went upstairs.
David arrived forty minutes later carrying two duffel bags and talking on the phone. He entered without greeting her, placed a finger against his lips, and walked to the window.
“No,” he said into the phone. “The transfer changes nothing if capacity is challenged. I understand that. Then file it. File whatever preserves the claim.”
Emily sat on the edge of the bed.
David glanced at her and turned toward the glass.
“She has a documented history of grief-related instability,” he continued. “Yes. We can get statements.”
Emily stood.
He ended the call.
“Whose capacity?”
He put the phone in his pocket. “Your mother’s attorney is playing games.”
“Whose capacity are you challenging?”
“We are not challenging anything yet.”
“You just said—”
“I said we need to preserve options.”
“She knew exactly what she was doing this morning.”
“You think being cruel proves she’s competent?”
Emily stared at him.
David pulled his duffel onto the luggage rack. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”
“What statements?”
“Nothing has been decided.”
“What statements, David?”
He unzipped the bag. Inside were three folded shirts, running shoes, a toiletry case, and the blue binder he kept in the locked drawer of his home office.
He closed the bag again.
“You’ve seen how she’s been since your dad died.”
“Sad?”
“Erratic.”
“She transferred her property into a trust.”
“She gave away a forty-million-dollar house to make a point.”
“It’s hers.”
“It was supposed to be yours.”
Emily looked at the documents on the desk. “Who told you that?”
“Your father.”
“When?”
“Many times.”
“Where?”
His jaw moved.
“Where were you when Dad told you his house would be mine?”
“We had conversations.”
“You and my father could barely finish lunch without arguing.”
“He respected me more than you think.”
“My father called you a man who wore expensive shoes into wet cement.”
David’s face hardened. “Your father enjoyed humiliating people.”
“He enjoyed you less than most.”
The words came out before she decided to say them.
May you like
For an instant, they were both startled.
David walked into the bathroom and shut the door. Water began running in the sink. Emily remained standing beside the bed, her heart beating too quickly for a conversation that had contained no shouting.
