Chapter 22
Leah was on the bungalow porch with her coffee and half a crossword when Will’s truck came down the lane much too fast.
“Tess,” she called through the screen. “Will’s here.”
“Will who?”
“How many Wills do we know?”
Tess came out with a dish towel over her shoulder and no shoes on. Ernest was asleep on the porch rail. The rooster opened one eye as Will came up the path.
He stopped at the bottom step with his hands empty. Leah noticed that first because Will rarely showed up anywhere without carrying something.
“I need to talk to you both.”
Tess looked at him. “That sounds serious.”
“It’s important.”
Ernest made a low sound from the rail, as if he expected to be included.
“Go on,” Leah said.
“I’ve been to Captiva.”
Tess took the dish towel off her shoulder. “You’ve been where?”
“I drove up Thursday morning and came back yesterday. I told Kaitlyn it was for the documentary.”
Leah set down her coffee.
“You lied to her?”
“I did, and I hated it. I think she knows something’s wrong.”
“Why did you go to Captiva?”
Will looked from Leah to Tess. “I went to see Gretchen.”
For a second neither woman spoke.
“Is our sister all right?” Leah asked.
“She’s fine. Nothing happened.”
Ernest climbed down from the rail and crossed the porch toward Will.
“Then why did you need to see her?”
Will took a breath. “I asked for her blessing. I want to marry Kaitlyn.”
Tess covered her mouth with the dish towel.
Leah smiled before she could stop herself. “What did Gretchen say?”
“She cried for about ninety seconds. Then she asked me three questions I wasn’t prepared for and said yes.” Will glanced down as Ernest began studying one of his bootlaces. “After that she told me if I made her daughter live on a houseboat, she would drive across the state and come get her.”
Leah laughed.
“Then Chelsea came over, so I had to explain the whole thing again.”
“You did it twice?” Tess asked.
“I did. I don’t recommend it.”
Ernest lost interest in Will’s boot and wandered into the herb bed.
“Ernest,” Tess warned.
The rooster ignored her.
“Tess, let him have the basil,” Leah said.
“He’s had the basil three times this week.”
“He’s going to have it a fourth.”
Will put both hands on the porch rail. His smile disappeared, and Leah understood that he hadn’t come only to tell them the news.
“Gretchen’s her mother, so I needed to ask her first. But I know what you two mean to Kaitlyn. I know how much she loves you.” He hesitated. “I don’t want to do this without asking you too.”
Tess’s eyes filled immediately.
“Oh, man,” Will said softly. “Here we go.”
“I’m not crying.”
“You are absolutely crying,” Leah said.
“I really love her,” he continued. “I want to spend my life with her, and I hope you’ll both be happy about that.”
Tess was crying openly now.
Down in the herb bed, Ernest lifted his head and made the loudest sound Leah had heard from him in years. It still wasn’t quite a crow, but it was close.
Tess laughed through her tears. “Even Ernest says yes.”
“Does he?”
“He does.”
Leah stood and went down the steps. She put her arms around Will.
“Of course it’s yes. We knew this day would come.”
His shoulders seemed to relax against her.
Tess came down after her and hugged him too.
“Thank you for asking us,” Leah said when they stepped apart. “You didn’t have to.”
“Yes, I did.”
That answer told Leah more than anything else could have.
Tess wiped her face with the dish towel and left a streak of basil across one cheek.
“When are you doing it?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Will.”
“I’m not telling either of you.”
“Please?” Tess said. “I can keep a secret.”
Will and Leah looked at each other.
“No,” they said together.
“I can keep one for a day.”
“That’s about my read on it,” Will said. “The answer is still no.”
He climbed the first step. “I need to talk to Connie about the room. That’s all you’re getting.”
Tess stopped crying. “The room at Max’s?”
Will closed his eyes.
“You’re doing it at Max’s.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Leah picked up her coffee. “Go home, Will. Take a shower. You look like a man who drove across Florida twice in three days.”
“I am that man.”
He hugged them both again and started toward the truck. Halfway there, he turned around.
“She thinks something’s wrong. She’s been looking at me that way for two weeks, and I’ve had to let her.”
“Then fix it as soon as you can,” Leah said.
“That’s the plan.”
They watched the truck disappear down the lane. Ernest came out of the herb bed with a piece of basil in his beak and returned to the porch rail.
Tess slipped an arm around Leah.
“This is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”
Leah looked at the basil on her sister’s cheek and smiled. “If you cry one more time, we’ll never get to work. And wipe your face.”
Jake had given Emma a rejected piece of cedar from the pergola and shown her how to sand with the grain. She spent two hours beneath the lignum vitae working one-eighty grit over a board that wasn’t going to become anything at all.
By the time she finished, the wood felt smooth beneath her palm.
Jake ran his hand over it once and nodded. “Not bad.”
“Not bad?”
“You’re still an apprentice.”
Emma smiled. “I’m beginning to think there’s no promotion coming.”
“There might be benefits.”
She looked at him.
Jake smiled and went back to work.
Around three, he brought out two glasses of iced tea. Emma stayed until late afternoon.
The next morning, she put on the gray Chicago blazer she’d packed in case she needed to take a client call.
Rachel had told her to wear something similar for Wednesday’s hearing. Emma decided she wanted it today too. Not because she needed to impress anyone at Alden and Petit.
She wanted to feel like herself when Arthur walked through the door.
Yolanda was at the front desk when Emma arrived at nine. Two coffees sat beside her keyboard. She handed one over without asking.
“He’ll be here at nine-thirty. His attorney is Ted Ballard out of Marathon. I’ve dealt with him twice, and he doesn’t do his homework. Rachel has done nothing but homework since Friday.”
Yolanda pointed toward the back. “The middle stack has grown. Don’t touch it.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
“You’re in the small conference room across the hall. Stay all day if you want. Leave whenever you want. Rachel will come out during breaks.”
Emma followed her down the hall.
“There’s water and coffee,” Yolanda continued. “I put cookies in there. You’ll want to look busy, so I brought you a legal pad.”
Emma smiled. “Thank you.”
The conference room held a long table, four chairs and a small sofa beneath the window. A plate of shortbread cookies sat beside the water pitcher.
Emma had brought Gloria’s leather notebook. She settled onto the sofa and opened it to the place she’d stopped Saturday night.
Em came for a week once and spent the first two days sulking about a boy who had gone to camp instead of coming to Miami.
On the third day she got up before I did and I found her on the porch drinking my coffee and reading a book.
She said good morning Grandma. She sounded like her father.
I sat down beside her and I didn’t say anything for a while, but I wondered how this little girl had already learned about coffee.
Emma read the entry three times.
She remembered the coffee. More surprisingly, she remembered Tyler Halloran, who had chosen lacrosse camp in Vermont over visiting his cousins in Miami.
Gloria had known his name all along.
Her grandmother had watched Emma suffer through the particular heartbreak of being fourteen and hadn’t tried to talk her out of it. Three days later, Gloria had simply sat beside her on the porch.
Emma had never understood that as a gift before.
She pressed her thumb against the page.
A door opened somewhere across the hall. Rachel’s voice came first, followed by a man Emma didn’t recognize. Then she heard Arthur.
The sound of his voice brought back a phone call from a year earlier.
Emma had been sitting in her Chicago office when Arthur called about Gloria’s obituary.
She had believed everything he told her.
Afterward, she cried at her desk for nearly an hour before opening the spreadsheet she had been working on and finishing the day.
It bothered her now to remember how easily she had trusted him, but that woman hadn’t known what Emma knew today. She couldn’t change that.
She could only decide what she did with the truth now.
Emma closed the notebook and rested her hand on the cover.
The voices continued behind the wall.
She couldn’t make out the words, but Rachel sounded calm. Arthur didn’t. At first his answers were long enough that Emma imagined him trying to explain his way around whatever Rachel had put in front of him. Before ten, his voice had changed. His answers became shorter.
Emma went to the table and opened the legal pad Yolanda had left for her.
She wrote three things she wanted to do.
Sand cedar until smooth.
Read three more entries.
Call Priya on the drive back.
None of them had anything to do with Arthur.
Emma stared at the list. Her uncle was being questioned across the hall about what he had done to Gloria’s estate, yet she was thinking about Jake, her grandmother’s notebook and a friend in Chicago.
It felt like proof that Arthur was no longer taking up all the room in her life or her thoughts.
At ten-fifteen, Rachel opened the conference room door.
“Break.”
“How’s it going?”
“Better than I’d hoped. Ted didn’t prepare him for the property records, and those records are a problem for him. Arthur is trying to say he was confused about which will controlled the estate.”
“Can he do that?”
“He can say it. The documents make it difficult to support.”
Rachel came farther into the room.
“The recorded copy we filed from Monroe County is particularly hard for him to explain. I’m not going to predict Wednesday before we get there, but nothing I’ve heard this morning has hurt us.”
Emma nodded. That was enough.
“How much longer?”
“Another hour before lunch, then probably two after. We should finish by four.”