Chapter 4: Eleanor’s Letter
Eleanor’s handwriting had not changed. The same loops, the same pressure on the downward strokes, the same habit of underlining a word when she wanted it to stay put.
She wrote that she was not afraid of dying so much as she was tired of watching people confuse blood with entitlement. She wrote that she had loved Rebecca as a child and had stopped making excuses for the adult. She wrote that the motel near the interstate still sat in her memory like a stain she could not scrub out of the family name. The house on Lake Marlin, she said, was not a reunion prize. It was a place for me to stand without asking permission. If Rebecca and Trent arrived with bags and soft voices, I was to use the deed the way she had intended—as a door that locked from the inside.
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She had left a separate note for Caroline Briggs: if the family contested, the attorney was authorized to release a timeline of the nine years of unanswered calls, returned letters, and the single visit Eleanor had made to Rebecca’s kitchen after my injury—when she had heard, herself, the suggestion of a weekly motel. Eleanor had not been sentimental about evidence. She had been thorough.
I folded the letter, put it back in the envelope, and set it under the brass key. Outside, a car engine turned over in the driveway, then another. They were leaving, or repositioning. I did not go to the window to find out which.
