"So we just... give it to her?"
Helen looked toward the living room, toward the wood paneling and the mantel photographs and the late light that had become, somehow, the color of the afternoon the will was read. "I don't know yet. I need to meet her. Not as his nurse. As whoever she actually was."
Diane's jaw tightened. "I'm coming with you."
"No," Helen said gently. "Not the first time. If I bring you, I bring a jury. I need to bring a widow."
What Diane's investigator produced, over the following six weeks, was less a scandal than a chronology of careful damage. Hotel receipts from Boston, Hartford, a motor lodge near Bar Harbor with a view of the water Robert had loved since childhood. A separate checking account opened in 1991 under Robert's name alone, closed in 2004, reopened briefly in 2011. Transfers that never exceeded what a frugal man might call help. No second life insurance policy. No secret child. No property in Margaret's name prior to the will. The report read, Diane told Helen over Sunday lasagna, like the paperwork of a man who wanted to sin without becoming a spectacle.
"He was tidy about it," Diane said, stabbing a piece of pasta as if pasta had participated. "That's what I can't get past. He filed his betrayal the way he filed tax returns."
Helen wiped a spot of sauce from the table. "Your father believed that order was a moral category. If the columns added up, the life beneath them could be forgiven."
"Do you forgive him?"