“You’re seriously not going to accept this.”
I looked at the envelope in my hands. Jenny’s handwriting. Her unmistakable slanted script.
“Your mother wanted me to have the farm,” I told him.
Helen handed me a rusty key—old, heavy, the kind that belonged to a completely different era.
“This opens the farmhouse. The address is on the deed.”
I took the key and didn’t say anything else. There was nothing left to say.
What did Marcus do the moment he owned the house?
I returned to the house on Brentwood Circle that afternoon: the house where Jenny and I had lived for eighteen years, the house where she had passed away in our bedroom holding my hand and whispering words I was still trying to fully hear.
It wasn’t my house anymore. I understood that, technically.
But I still hadn’t accepted it in my heart.
Marcus arrived that night without knocking.
He walked into the guest room where I was packing the few things I had managed to recover from my old office before the contractors began dismantling Jenny’s bookshelves.
He had a folder tucked under his arm.
