"Because if I had said it aloud you would have made it a moral crisis before we had numbers." He turned. His face was blotched with anger and with something else, something closer to the boy with the small hammer. "And now there are numbers. Pruitt has a paper. I have his money. If I can't deliver even a conversation about a listing, he will say I misrepresented an estate. Do you understand? This isn't only Mother being poetic. This lands on me."
"It lands on Ruth," Helen said, surprising herself. The sentence came out before her strategy could catch it. She heard it and did not take it back, though she wanted to. "If we fight, it lands on Ruth. If we don't, your developer lands on you. Those are not the same weight, Mark. I am not saying you are fine. I am saying don't pretend the house fell on your head out of a clear sky. You leaned."
Mark looked at her as if she had changed sides in a game they had invented together. "You're really not going to contest it."
"I don't know what I'm going to do," Helen said. "I know I sat in this chair planning to. I know Paul told me not to win ugly, and I was rude to him for it. I know the napkin — it was a magazine — is not a contract, because I looked it up at one in the morning like a person who already knew the answer. We cannot force each other to sell what none of us owns. We can only sue our mother's last clear wish and call it fairness because we used that word first." She pressed her fingers to her mouth, then lowered them. "I hate that she saw the page. I hate that she was right about why I wanted it written. Seth's last tuition. The kitchen. I had already spent the house in my head too. Not to a man in a polo shirt. To a life that would look finished. She knew the difference and she still put us in the same paragraph. I am angry enough to be fair, which is a disgusting feeling."