Two Words

I didn't tell Griffin. Not right away.

He was pacing the parking lot when I came out, keys jingling in his fist like he wanted to throw them at something. "He didn't even argue," he said. "Twenty-two years married to Mom and he didn't say one word to defend himself. Because he can't. Because he knows exactly what he did."

"What did he do, though?" I asked. "What's he supposed to have done?"

"I don't know, Tessa, manipulated a dying woman? Talked her into cutting us out?"

That didn't sound like Warren. Nothing about Warren had ever sounded dramatic. He was the guy who fixed the garbage disposal without being asked, who remembered to defrost the car on cold mornings, who said maybe four sentences at Thanksgiving and meant every one of them. He wasn't a schemer. He barely qualified as a talker.

But grief makes you want a villain, and Griffin had found his.

We drove back to Mom's house — Warren's house, now, technically — in separate cars, and I sat in the driveway for ten minutes before I went in. He was in the kitchen, in the cardigan, making tea for one like the world hadn't just rearranged itself.

"Unit 214," I said, holding up the key. "What is it?"

He didn't turn around. "A storage place off Route 9. She rented it the year you turned sixteen. I've never been inside."

"Fifteen years and you never asked?"

"She asked me not to." He finally looked at me, and for the first time all day something moved behind his eyes — not guilt, I realized. Something closer to relief. "Go tonight, Tessa. Bring your brother. Whatever's in there, it isn't mine to explain."

"Why not?"

He turned back to the kettle, and for a second I thought that was the whole answer I was getting.

Then, quietly: "Because if I explain it, you'll think I'm trying to earn something back."

I stood in that kitchen a long time after he left the room, turning the key over in my hand, trying to decide if that sentence made him sound innocent or like the best liar I'd ever met.