Emma stepped back as if struck.
I turned to her. “Is that
true?”
Her eyes filled, but her voice stayed calm.
“I was lonely,” she said. “I was overwhelmed. And after enough people tell you that you’re confused, you start checking everything twice.”
Then she looked at Margaret.
“But I was not lying.”
My mother’s expression hardened almost imperceptibly.
“You have always been ungrateful,” she said.
There it was.
The sentence beneath all the others.
Emma absorbed it quietly. I could see how familiar it was to her.
I reached for my wife’s hand again.
“She owes you nothing,” I said.
Margaret’s eyes moved to our joined hands.
Something like panic flashed across her face.
Not sadness.
Not guilt.
Panic.
That was the moment I understood Emma had been right.
There was more.
Much more.
I called my driver and asked him to bring the car to the side entrance. Then I called my attorney, Samuel Reed, a steady, careful man who
