Chapter 5: The Hours Before Noon text
By nine o’clock the practical countermeasures were in place. Dad sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad and wrote a short list in the same precise handwriting he had used for decades of household accounts. He did not share the list with me, but I watched the lines form: the current will’s location, the title status of the truck, the names of the two attorneys who had drafted the most recent documents, and a note about the security cameras he had installed at the house the previous autumn after a series of break-ins in the neighborhood. He had never mentioned the cameras to Vanessa. She had never asked.
I made a second pot of coffee. Neither of us ate the remaining bacon. The frost outside began to thin under a pale sun, but the temperature inside the kitchen stayed exactly as it had been when the call ended—controlled, waiting, stripped of every soft interpretation Vanessa and Grant had tried to force onto the morning.
At eleven-forty a car door closed in my driveway. Dad did not rise. He simply set the pen down and folded his hands.
