“I have every business coming here, Margaret. I am here on behalf of Julia.”
Brent laughed once, sharp and ugly. “Of course you are.”
Evelyn turned her gaze toward him.
“And on behalf of the bank, the county recorder, and your late mother’s estate.”
The silence that followed was so complete that even the football announcer still playing faintly from the living room seemed embarrassed to speak.
My mother’s fingers curled around the edge of the doorframe. “Rose’s estate was settled years ago.”
“It was,” Evelyn said. “Badly.”
My father closed his eyes.
For one brief, strange second, I wished I had been there to see it. Not because I wanted to watch them suffer. I had spent too many years confusing justice with cruelty, and I knew better by then. But there was a part of me—the tired daughter, the ignored sister, the mother who had held her crying children in the car less than six hours earlier—that wanted proof they could still be shocked by truth.
