Eleven Years

Six years. Delphine did the math without meaning to — six more years of her father coming home late, six more years of her mother setting his plate at the table like nothing was wrong.

"Her name was Wynne Calder," Abernathy read. "She worked in your father's office for eight years. When Graham ended it, your mother paid for Wynne to move to another state, on the condition she never contact this family again."

"And Mom just — forgave him?" Corwin asked.

"I don't think 'forgive' is the word your mother would have used," Abernathy said. He kept reading. "'I did not do it for Graham. I did it because Juno was two years old, and I could not undo what had already been done to her by being cruel to her mother.'"

Barrett had stopped pacing. He stood very still now, hands flat on the back of a chair, like he needed it to keep standing.

"This is insane," he said, but the fight had gone out of his voice. "This is — she can't just rewrite the will around some woman none of us have ever met."

"She's not rewriting anything," Abernathy said. "She's honoring the terms she set thirty years ago. 'All her children,' Barrett. She meant all of them."

"I'll contest it," Barrett said. "I'll fight this in court, I don't care how long it—"

"You should sit down before you say something you can't take back," Delphine said quietly. It was the first time she'd spoken directly to him all morning, and something in her tone made him actually look at her.

Juno hadn't moved from her chair. She'd been silent through all of it, watching them argue about her like she wasn't in the room. When she finally spoke, her voice was flat, almost apologetic.

"She's been paying my rent for eleven years," Juno said.

The room went quiet.

"Not through a settlement," Juno said. "Not through Wynne. Directly. A check, first of every month, from an account with your family's name on it. I didn't know whose money it was until I was twenty-six."

Barrett's face had gone the color of the folder in Abernathy's hands.

"She knew where you lived," he said slowly. "She knew where you lived, and she never once told us."

Juno looked at him steadily. "She knew where I lived," she said, "because for the last year, I knew where she lived too. I visited her every month. In the care home. Right up until the week she died."