Page Fourteen

We called Delphine before the storage unit's gate even finished rolling shut behind us, and she agreed to meet us at her office within the hour, no questions asked, like she'd been half expecting the call.

She pulled the file without a word and flipped past the pages we'd already heard read aloud, past the boilerplate, until she reached a section stapled separately from the rest.

"Page fourteen," she said, "is a trust. Your mother set it up the same week she updated the will, kept it as a separate instrument so it wouldn't be part of the public reading. Everything currently titled to Warren converts fully to the two of you the moment he executes a single form transferring it — no deadline, no condition on his side except that it has to be his choice, made freely, whenever he decides to make it."

"So he could just never sign it," Griffin said. "Keep everything forever."

"He already signed it." Delphine turned another page and tapped a date stamped in the corner. "Six days after the funeral. Before either of you had any idea the storage unit existed."

I sat very still, doing the math. Six days after the funeral. Before the key. Before the boxes. Before we knew there was anything to forgive him for at all.

"Why wouldn't he tell us?" I asked. "Why let us think — everything we thought, this whole week?"

Delphine took her glasses off, folded them slowly, the way people do when they're about to say something they've been asked to hold onto. "He asked me the same thing you're asking me now, when he signed it. I told him you'd want to know sooner. He said no." She looked at each of us in turn. "He said, and I'm quoting him exactly: 'I don't want it to be about the money. I want them to find her first.'"

Neither Griffin nor I said anything for a long moment.

"He's been sitting at that kitchen table for six days," I finally said, "letting us hate him. On purpose."

Delphine slid the trust across the desk toward us. "I think," she said, "he's been doing that for considerably longer than six days."