Four Chairs
Barrett resigned before the board could vote. He didn't tell Delphine that night — she heard it the next morning, in a short, formal email cc'd to the whole family, the kind of message he'd have once made someone else write for him.
He agreed to repay what the audit had found, in installments that would take years. Nobody threw him a parade for it. Nobody forgave him out loud, either. But when Delphine called him two weeks later, he picked up on the first ring, and that felt like something.
Corwin's debt disappeared quietly, the way Juno had promised. He didn't talk about it much, except once, late on a Sunday, when he told Delphine he'd started going to meetings — actual ones, with folding chairs and bad coffee — and that he was ninety days clean of the tables.
"Ninety days isn't forever," he said.
"It's more than you had before," Delphine said.
The four of them met again at Larkspur on a bright Saturday in October, not for a reading this time, not for lawyers or folders or sealed envelopes. Juno had asked them to help her go through the house — sort what stayed, what got donated, what nobody could bear to touch yet.
Delphine found a box of photographs in the hall closet, decades old, curling at the edges. Odessa in her thirties, laughing at something off-camera. Graham, younger than Delphine had ever known him, one arm slung around a woman she now recognized from a single old office photo Feld had dug up — Wynne, unsmiling, looking straight at the lens like she already knew how this would end.
Delphine didn't say anything. She just set the box where Juno would find it, and let her have that discovery on her own terms.
Later, the four of them sat on the back porch as the sun went down over the garden their mother had planted and mostly ignored. Corwin brought out four mismatched glasses and poured something that wasn't quite a toast.
"To Mom," he said, "for being terrible at honesty and somehow still getting us all in one room."
"To Mom," Delphine echoed.
Barrett lifted his glass without quite meeting anyone's eyes, but he lifted it.
Juno hesitated, glass halfway up, looking at the three of them like she still expected someone to tell her she didn't belong at this table.
Nobody did.
"To four chairs," she said finally, "instead of three."
They drank. Behind them, the porch light flickered on, and for the first time in longer than any of them could remember, the Holbrook family looked, from the outside, exactly like what it was.