"Then we're already ahead." He almost smiled. The smile failed. "Agreed?"
Lydia thought of the green light and the boiler and the song behind the parlor door. She thought of Paul's heart, which Helen had mentioned in the car without quite asking for money, and of her own rent, which was late in a small way that could become a large way. She thought of being, again, the one who made things difficult. The waiting room hummed. A nurse laughed somewhere, not at them.
"If we do this," Lydia said, "we do it with her knowledge. We don't plot."
"We are not plotting," Helen said. "We are preventing a plot. There is a difference."
There was not, entirely. Lydia agreed anyway. She agreed with her mouth and with a nod and with the exhaustion of being the youngest in a room that had already decided what adulthood looked like. They did not have paper. Helen tore a page from the back of a magazine no one would miss, a page with an advertisement for a hearing aid on one side. On the blankish margin she wrote three sentences. The house on Orchard Street, if it comes to us or to any one of us, will be sold, and the proceeds divided in three equal shares. No one of us will accept a larger portion, even if a will provides it. We will not contest this understanding in the name of fairness, because this is the fairness. She signed. Mark signed. Lydia signed her name smaller than she usually did, as if a smaller name might leave a door.