Marcus looked at me.

“You’re seriously not going to accept this.”

I looked at the envelope in my hands. Jenny’s handwriting. Her unmistakable slanted script.

“Your mother wanted me to have the farm,” I told him.

Helen handed me a rusty key—old, heavy, the kind that belonged to a completely different era.

“This opens the farmhouse. The address is on the deed.”

I took the key and didn’t say anything else. There was nothing left to say.

What did Marcus do the moment he owned the house?

I returned to the house on Brentwood Circle that afternoon: the house where Jenny and I had lived for eighteen years, the house where she had passed away in our bedroom holding my hand and whispering words I was still trying to fully hear.

It wasn’t my house anymore. I understood that, technically.

But I still hadn’t accepted it in my heart.

Marcus arrived that night without knocking.

He walked into the guest room where I was packing the few things I had managed to recover from my old office before the contractors began dismantling Jenny’s bookshelves.

He had a folder tucked under his arm.

part 3