"Mom—"
"I know what you're going to say." Helen poured tea neither of them would drink. "You're going to say he betrayed me. You're going to say forty-one years were a lie. You're going to say I should hate him."
Diane looked up. Her eyes were wet and furious and young in a way that made Helen want to put her arms around a child who no longer existed. "Don't you?"
Helen sat. The black cardigan — she had washed it twice since the funeral and it still felt like the only appropriate skin — settled around her. "I hate that he made a second life in the margins of mine. I hate that he let me thank her. I hate the post office box and the weekends I thought were fishing trips and the way he looked at me across the breakfast table for decades as if I were the only person in the room. But hatred is a clean emotion, Diane. This is not clean. This is a house with two sets of keys and no honest floor plan."
Diane pushed the letters away as if distance could make them less true. "She still doesn't get the house."
"The will says otherwise."
"We can contest it. Undue influence. Lack of capacity. Something."
Helen shook her head. "He wrote it two years before he died. He was sharp then. Sharper than me about taxes and passwords and which gutters needed cleaning. If we contest it, we spend years and money proving he was the kind of man who could love two women and still balance a checkbook. I already know that. The court doesn't need to teach me."