The Reading of the Will
Twenty Years Late

What My Mother Was Planning

August 25, 2026 · Part 6 of 10 · 2 min

Imogen's throat felt tight. "Safe from what?"

Odalys didn't answer right away. She got up, moved to a rolltop desk in the corner, and came back with nothing yet — just her hands resting on its closed lid, like she needed to touch something solid before she kept going.

"Your mother came to me the week before she died," she said. "Not crying. Rosalind didn't cry in front of people, not even me, not by then. She sat exactly where you're sitting and asked if I still had a sister in the next county. She wanted to know how far it was. How fast she could get there with a five-year-old and one suitcase."

Imogen's stomach dropped somewhere she couldn't follow. "She was leaving him."

"She was planning to. Carefully. Quietly. She'd started keeping things — receipts, a diary, a few doctor's visits logged under a friend's name so your father's insurance wouldn't flag them. She didn't want anyone to be able to say later that she'd made it up." Odalys's jaw worked. "She was frightened of what people would believe, coming from a wife against a husband everyone in this town thought was a saint. So she built her case quietly instead. Piece by piece."

"Doctor's visits for what?" Imogen's voice had gone very thin.

Odalys looked at her for a long moment, and something in her expression made Imogen wish, briefly, that she hadn't asked.

"For you, mostly," she said. "Little things she couldn't explain to herself anymore, once she started really looking. Bruises she'd talked herself out of for a year. She stopped talking herself out of them at the end."

The room went silent except for the tick of a clock Imogen couldn't see.

"She never got the chance to leave," Odalys said finally. "She fell down the back stairs two days after she told me she was going. And two days before that, she gave me something and asked me to keep it for you — not just the ring." She finally opened the rolltop desk. "A letter. I still have it. I've had it this whole time."

Continue the story Part 7: The Knock That Wasn't Mine to Answer →

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