"Last week. Before you went over there. I wanted facts. Bank records. Travel history. Whether there was anyone else. Whether there was a child." Diane exhaled. "There isn't a child. There were hotel receipts. A cabin rental in Maine every October for eleven years. Transfers from a personal account you didn't know about — not huge, but regular. He paid her rent for a while in the nineties when she was between jobs. He stopped when she asked him to. The investigator said she seemed... careful. Not greedy. Which somehow makes it worse."
Helen pressed her palms flat on the table. The Formica was the same pale yellow it had been since 1991. "You investigated your father."
"I investigated the man who left our house to a stranger." Diane's voice broke on the last word. "I needed to know if I was allowed to hate him completely. I'm not. That's the worst part. The report makes him look like a man who tried to be decent inside an indecent arrangement. He never left you. He never hit anyone. He paid his taxes and coached soccer and remembered birthdays and kept a woman in a duplex like a second language he was fluent in and ashamed of. What am I supposed to do with that?"
Helen reached across the table and took her daughter's hand. Diane's fingers were cold. "You're supposed to be angry. You're supposed to grieve the father you thought you had and meet the father you actually had, and you're supposed to let those two men argue in your chest for as long as it takes. What you are not supposed to do is burn the house down to punish a ghost."
"I wasn't going to burn it down."
"Metaphorically," Helen said, and almost smiled, and the almost-smile hurt.
Winter came early that year. Snow covered Maple Avenue in December and turned the front walk into a negotiation. Helen hired a neighbor boy to shovel. She attended a grief group at the Methodist church twice and then stopped, because the other widows spoke of marriages that sounded simpler than hers, and she did not know how to say my husband loved me and also someone else without turning the circle into a courtroom. Diane came over every Sunday. They cooked. They watched old movies. They avoided the manila folder, which lived now in the desk drawer beside Robert's unused checkbooks.
In January, the lawyer called. Probate was proceeding. Margaret had not yet filed a refusal. Helen had not yet asked her to. The house remained in a legal limbo that felt, to Helen, like the emotional limbo she woke up in every morning: still hers by habit, no longer hers by ink.