“Yes.”
“Mom.”
“Yes.”
Elise’s face tightened painfully.
I looked at her. Something passed behind her eyes and vanished so quickly I might have missed it if I had not spent forty years learning every version of her guilt.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Elise.”
She shook her head and reached for the crate marked HOUSE. “We should keep going.”
I caught her wrist.
She went still.
“What?”
“Mom, please.”
That word was wrong. Elise used please when she wanted cooperation, never mercy.
Jonah noticed too. He stopped touching the papers.
Wade stared at the labels as though one of them might open itself and rescue him.
I released Elise slowly. “Fine. Later.”
Her shoulders dropped a fraction, which told me later contained something real.
I hated this room.
I hated how Randall had managed to die and still organize the order in which people disappointed me.
The MEDICAL box was heavier than it looked. Jonah lifted it onto the table before I could object, and when I pulled back the lid I found records arranged by date, each bundle clipped neatly. Randall had always kept terrible paperwork. During our marriage, tax documents migrated into cookbooks, appliance warranties lived inside old birthday cards, and once he had filed the registration for our fishing boat in a Christmas tin labeled PECAN SANDIES.
