Chapter 6 #2
My throat closed. I could see myself from a distance, sitting at this table with my family, listening to them pick at the meat of my life, and felt the old sensation flood in—the one from childhood dinners when Marla would bring home a boyfriend who’d start drinking, and my job became making myself small, invisible, quiet. It had worked then.
It didn’t work now. I couldn’t make my skin smaller.
My eyes were hot. I stared hard at the neat, looping shorthand on the legal pad. “Is there any way to contest this? She didn’t tell me. Not once. I’ve worked there all my life. I was told—she told me—it would be mine.” My voice cracked on that last word.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, and I believed he meant it. “But this is her will. Short of proving incapacity or undue influence at the time of execution—which, to be frank, would be a very high bar here—”
“Undue influence,” Karen repeated, tasting a new phrase like a new candy. “From who, exactly? There wasn’t a man in her life to whisper foolishness in her ear. Unless…” She tilted her head. “Unless our Emmaline is arguing Mama wasn’t in her right mind. That’d be a choice.”
“Mama.” Roxie again, a little louder with a warning tone underneath.
“What?” Karen snapped. “We’re all adults here. It’s not my fault Emmaline can’t handle basic facts.”
Basic facts. I thought about the last nine months, about telling bakers who’d come to help that, yes, we could keep the ovens going if we swapped the breaker and worked by battery-powered lanterns; about standing on a stepladder to sand the trim while sweat ran down my back; about the day I rolled out the first sheet of cinnamon roll dough in the newly bright kitchen and almost cried because it smelled right again.
Basic facts were that I had done the work.
Basic facts were that none of that mattered if I didn’t also come up with a husband the court would recognize.
“That’s enough,” Whitlock said, with a note in his voice that suggested he had a spine under the stoop that bowed his back. “Ms. Maddox, if you’d like to discuss options privately—”
“There are options?” The words jumped out of me, a fish snatched off a line.
“Options for timing,” he amended. “Or… logistics.” He chose the word like it might bite him. “But the condition itself stands.”
“I’m happy to talk logistics.” Marla leaned back far enough that the chair creaked. “It’ll be so good having the house back in the family, Karen. The way Mama intended.”
“The house has been in the family,” I gritted out. “I live there. I’ve kept it standing.”
“Oh, sweetie.” The sweetness in her tone was arsenic. “You’ve been staying there. It’s not the same.”
The lights hummed. The air conditioner kicked on, blew lukewarm air, and kicked off again immediately like it had given up, exactly as I was expected to do.
“Emmaline?” Ben said, hesitant. He scratched behind his ear, eyes flicking between me and Whitlock. “For what it’s worth… this is… well, it’s rotten.”
“Thanks.” The word scraped out of my throat.
Roxie touched my hand across the table. The smallest thing. It almost undid me.
Whitlock closed the folder with a tidy thump. “That is the full reading,” he said. “If you’d like copies—”
Karen was already on her feet. “We’ll take ours.”
“Of course.” He slid envelopes across the table. One stopped by my hand.
I stared at it—the white flap, the creased edge.
If I opened it, would the words be different this time?
If I read them silently and alone, would they rearrange themselves into something reasonable?
The bakery to my granddaughter, Emmaline, who has earned every inch of counter space with sweat and skill, no strings attached.
I visualized Gran’s neat cursive, heard her voice and the way she’d say my name when I came in before dawn.
Emmaline, child, wash your hands. The sugar’s in the second bin. Keep your bench clean.
A different will, a different world.
Someone pushed back a chair; the legs scraped against the wood floor. Marla was already riffling through her envelope, mouth twisting like she’d found a surprise but not the kind that delighted. Karen tucked hers under her arm and checked the time.
I stood. The motion sent a hot pulse through my temples; I pressed two fingers there and forced my mouth into something that wasn’t a grimace. “Thank you,” I said to Whitlock, because Gran had raised me to be polite even in the lion’s den. “For… your time.”
“Emmaline,” he said softly. “If you wish to come back—”
“I’ll be in touch,” I lied.
The hallway outside was too bright after the muted office; sunlight washed across the checkerboard linoleum, and the heat that had been trapped all day in the old building hit me like opening an oven.
I got two steps before the murmur of voices spilled out behind me—Marla’s titter, Karen’s chuckle, paper crinkling—and the sound crawled up my spine.
“Emmaline.” Roxie again, at my shoulder, breathless from catching up. “Hey. I’m… I’m sorry.”
I nodded, because I didn’t trust my throat to handle actual words. The envelope in my hand had already wilted with humidity.
“You okay to drive?” she asked.
“I’m fine.”
I was not fine. I was a cracked bowl being asked to hold boiling water.
“I’ve got work.”
She hesitated, then squeezed my forearm. “Call me if you need—”
“I won’t.” We both winced at how that sounded, so I added, “But thank you.” The lie tasted of chalk too.
By the time I pushed through the glass door to the parking lot, the heat slapped the breath out of me again—the kind of late-July heat that stuck to your skin and made everything slow.
The asphalt shimmered. Somewhere, a cicada buzzed like a power line.
I stood there for a long moment, blinking at the way the world looked wavy around the edges.
The bakery—the one I’d scraped and painted and scrubbed back to life—rose up in my mind so sharp my chest hurt.
The new cases gleaming under warm lights.
The scent of bread at four-thirty in the morning.
The hush before dawn when it was just me and the dough and the day ahead.
I had thought I was safe there, that if I worked hard enough, loved it hard enough, I couldn’t be stripped of it.
I should’ve known better. I should’ve remembered what it felt like to be sixteen with a duffel on my shoulder, counting on a door to open that didn’t have to.
“Legally married,” I said out loud to the empty parking lot, because sometimes you had to hear a thing to believe it.
No man in my life. No interest in finding one.
No time.
No trust.
No chance.