I thought about the evening a week earlier, the patio under the string lights, the velvet box I had placed on the table between us. The brass key to the stone house by the creek. Eight million dollars at current market, though I had not said that because it seemed beside the point. I had said only that I wanted her
to begin her married life without debt, which was true, and which was the thing Richard would have done if he had lived to see this.
Samantha had cried.
Greg had picked up the key and turned it over in his hand and said he supposed they would need to hire a proper landscaper because they couldn’t have the property looking like a working farm when his friends came to visit. Then he had looked at my hands, which were stained from the morning’s work,
and said something about my boots that I did not entirely catch because I was watching my daughter laugh at the observation.
I had told myself they were nervous. Young. Absorbed in the approaching wedding. I had driven my pickup back to the main house and washed my hands at the kitchen sink and told myself that people are complicated and that love, when it arrives, sometimes comes wrapped in things you have to learn to look past.
I had let it go.
Until that morning.
“Understood,” I said.
I ended the call.
