Penrose said nothing about that. He had practiced in Larkspur for thirty-one years, long enough to know which silences saved a meeting and which ones only delayed the weather. The wood paneling held the smell of lemon oil and old paper. Somewhere below them a copier worked and stopped. On the street a bus sighed at the curb. None of these sounds entered the conversation, and yet the room was full of them.
Lydia Harlan came in without knocking, because the receptionist had told her not to bother. She was forty-four. The cardigan she wore was the color of oatmeal and a little too light for the air-conditioning, and she kept it on anyway. Her hair had been pinned up in the car and was already loosening. She looked at her sister, at her brother, at the lawyer she had met twice in her life, and at the folder. No one had stood to greet her. She took the empty chair. The leather gave under her as if someone else had been expected to weigh more.
Penrose waited until she had drawn the chair in. Then he opened the folder. He did not read from the top sheet. He knew the sentence. He had written it in April at a kitchen table nine miles from this room, with a window open on a grape arbor and a woman in a blue robe listening as if the words were a door she had finally decided to walk through.
"Your mother's last change says the house does not split three ways."
Mark's chair went back so quickly it struck the paneling. He was on his feet before the echo finished. "Don't. We already settled this."