Chapter 18 Zoe Spring 2025
Zoe
‘Go ahead, Jeremy,’ says Fiona. ‘We’re all listening. I’m here with my sisters. Sara, Zoe and Steph.’
Her mobile phone is balanced on the butter dish in the centre of the kitchen table. The four women surround it, each cradling a mug. Zoe catches herself thinking of them as her sisters but then stops. They’re not her sisters at all.
‘Right. I’ve looked into the will in detail over the past week. I’ve talked to the son of the solicitor who drew it up.’ The official voice pauses. ‘His father is retired now but the son was able to speak to him, and because of the slightly unusual terms of the will, the old man remembered it.’
Steph is tapping on her mug with her fingernail. ‘Will you stop that?’ says Fiona. ‘I can’t hear what Jeremy is saying.’
Steph looks away but stops tapping her finger.
‘To explain the will, I need to go back to the beginning. As I understand it, your late mother Camilla Wright came from a wealthy country family. The DeProses. There appears to have been some reluctance within the family to her marriage to your father who came from a less-well-off family.’ He clears his throat.
‘Yes, Dad was a farm labourer, we know that,’ says Fiona.
‘Your mother was eventually given permission to marry but only on the understanding that there was a pre-nuptial agreement. The pre-nuptial agreement set out the terms of what would happen in the event both of any divorce but also on the death of your parents and who could inherit. Happily, the marriage was a success and there was no need for divorce. But the pre-nuptial agreement had strict terms about who could inherit your mother’s heritable estate – essentially Highdown Hall and the surrounding land – what’s left of it now.
Her moveable estate – cash, jewellery, books, etc.
– she was free to do with what she pleased.
But the property – Highdown Hall – was a different matter.
This had been gifted to your mother by her parents on her marriage to your father.
They wanted to ensure the property didn’t pass into your father’s hands if there was a divorce.
They didn’t really want it to go to anyone outside the immediate family. This is really the crux of it.’
Fiona waves her hand impatiently. ‘Yes, yes.’
‘Under the terms of the pre-nuptial agreement, which we see reflected in your mother’s will, the only beneficiaries for the family home and land were to be Camilla’s children – her own biological children.
She was precluded from leaving the land to any organisation or anyone except her children.
It had to stay in the family. There were separate conditions if they didn’t have children, but obviously that was not the case. ’
They all stare intently at the phone, although Zoe knows they’re only going to hear what they already know. There’s silence on the phone.
‘Jeremy, are you there?’
‘Yes, sorry, did you miss that? The line is a bit crackly. I said that under the terms of the pre-nuptial agreement, which is reflected in the will, the only beneficiaries for the family home and land are her children. So Stephanie, Fiona and Sara – in equal shares.’
Zoe’s stomach seems to fall, as if she’s jumped from a great height.
To hear her mother’s children listed by this official disembodied voice and for her not be in that list brings the reality of her situation crashing home.
She’s not her mother’s child. She will never get used to that, no matter how many times she hears it.
‘Well, at least we all know for sure now,’ says Fiona. ‘We know the reasoning behind the will. That it wasn’t Mum’s fault, she had no choice.’
‘I think we already knew that, Fi, but anyway . . .’ Zoe takes a sip of tea.
‘While the will cannot be challenged, in reality, now that the three of you own the property, you can do what you like with it. If you, as the three daughters, decide that you want to gift a share to your mother’s granddaughter, then that is your legal right to do.
There will be tax implications, of course. ’
Three daughters. Mother’s granddaughter. She always felt separate from her sisters, different somehow, but to repeatedly hear it in this official language is worse somehow.
‘My recommendation would be to wait for a while, to let the dust settle, and then decide what you want to do,’ the voice says. ‘I’ll be here to support you through whatever you decide. It won’t be as complicated as you might imagine.’
Zoe looks around the kitchen that she’s been in almost every day of her life.
Every nook and cranny is familiar to her.
When the will was first read out, not having her share of Highdown Hall seemed like the worst thing that could ever happen to her.
Now it feels like the least of her worries.
She gets up and stands at the window, looking into her mother’s abandoned herb garden.
The rosemary and oregano are leggy with age while the parsley and basil’s new shoots are growing through last year’s brown, withered stalks.
A huge weed strikes through the middle, adding to the wildness.
Behind her she hears Fiona saying goodbye to the solicitor.
There’s a scraping of chair legs and then silence.
Thank God they’ve gone. She just wants to be on her own.
She really must do something about the herb garden.
Her mother would hate to see it neglected.
She turns and jumps slightly when she realises she’s not alone at all. Steph sits immobile at the table, hands planted on the wood, staring at something in the distance. In her hands is a folded piece of paper.
‘You made me jump,’ Zoe says, unable to stop the note of accusation in her voice.
‘Sorry,’ says Steph. ‘I just wanted to say that if there’s anything you want to know, from that time . . .’
Steph is biting the skin at the side of her thumbnail, her grey eyes watching her.
‘I want to speak to Mum, that’s what I want. To ask her why she lied all those years, why she didn’t have the courage to say anything at the end. I feel so—’ Zoe swallows. ‘So angry,’ she bursts out in a shout.
Steph recoils but then speaks so quietly that Zoe barely hears her over the sound of her own heart. ‘I feel angry too. It wasn’t what I wanted. I need to show you something.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Zoe sees her pick up the letter. She doesn’t want to look at it. She doesn’t care what’s in it.
‘D’you remember when you handed out those envelopes with the will readings in them? The day Mum died?’
Zoe stares at her. That feels like a million years ago. The before time.
‘You said you thought there had been two sheets of paper in my envelope, rather than just the funeral reading.’
Zoe keeps looking at her, saying nothing.
‘You were right,’ Steph says, unfolding the piece of paper. ‘The other was a letter from Mum.’
She smooths it out on the table.
Zoe grits her teeth. Steph got a letter from Mum, but she, the forgotten daughter, her non-daughter, got nothing. No letter, no explanation. Nothing. Just a posthumous disowning. A de-daughtering.
Steph slides it across the table towards Zoe.
Zoe sits down and stares at it, but the words blur before her eyes.
There’s a long silence. ‘Do you want me to read it?’ asks Steph eventually.
She should read it herself, thinks Zoe. But she feels so angry, so let down, she worries that she’ll tear the paper into tiny pieces, destroy her mother’s words. Her grandmother’s words. She nods, and Steph takes the paper back and then has a sip of tea. It must be cold by now.
‘Dear Stephanie,
‘If you’re reading this, then we have not reconciled and that is something I deeply regret.
‘I want to apologise to you for many things, things that I never had the courage to discuss in person while I was alive.
‘Firstly, for not having the courage to tell Zoe about who her mother is, and for leaving you to do it after I’ve gone.
In the past few years, I’ve tried desperately hard to get the terms of the will changed, but my parents were clever and there was no legal loophole we could use to get out of it.
So I knew that Zoe’s heritage would come out once I’d gone.
I’m sorry that that has been left to you at such a difficult time.
I shouldn’t have laid that on your shoulders.
‘Your dad always argued that Zoe had the right to know and you had the right to be her mother. Having reflected on this for the last thirty-five years, I know he was right. I’m sorry I didn’t come to that conclusion when there was time to rectify it.
‘I want you to know that I took Zoe as my child with the best of intentions. I thought it was best for both you and for Zoe. With everything that happened in the months and years before you left and what happened while you were missing, I was terribly worried that bringing up a baby wasn’t the right thing for you.
I was worried that you weren’t in a position to be Zoe’s mum and that could be detrimental to her.
I was concerned you’d run away again and take Zoe with you and anything could happen. ’
Steph falters. She swallows audibly and carries on. Zoe stares out of the kitchen window. The sickness in her stomach has never quite gone away and she can feel it growing now.