"You lent Sarah money," Emma said. Her voice was very quiet. "Sarah, who wouldn't take forty dollars for a school trip in 2011 because she said your loans came with furniture moved while you were out. That Sarah borrowed money from you. Secured on Mum's house."
"People change when they're dying, pumpkin."
"Don't call me that."
"Emma —"
"Don't." She was shaking, but it was the good kind, the kind with a spine in it. "You will not stand in her kitchen, at her table, and tell me my sister changed into somebody who needed you. Show me the paper, Gary. If there's paper, show it. Otherwise take your wine and go back down the lane before I remember everything out loud, in front of Leo."
Leo was in the doorway. Nobody had heard him, because children in that house had learned early how to enter rooms the way weather enters them. He was looking at Gary with the flat, considering stare he had turned on Margaret — except that Margaret had passed the examination, and Gary, in the half-second before he arranged his face, plainly knew he had failed it.
"Hello, sport," Gary said. "You've grown."
"You said the house smells like poor people," Leo said. "At Mum's funeral lunch. You said it to the lady with the ham. I was under the table. I heard properly."
The silence was total. Derek, in the porch doorway with a drill in his hand, became suddenly very interested in a screw.
"Out," Emma said.
Gary picked up his wine. At the gate he paused, and spoke to Nathan alone, pleasantly, as men speak to men in his world, assuming a fraternity Nathan wanted no part of. "A word of advice, Reed. Courts like paperwork better than sentiment. And I have paperwork."
He drove away too fast for the lane, sending a fan of gravel over Sarah's bulbs.
Emma stood in the kitchen with her hands flat on the table, breathing. Leo went to her and leaned the whole weight of himself against her side, and she put an arm round him without looking down, the way you hold a railing you trust.
"He's going to send it," she said. "The paper. Whatever it is."
"Then we'll read it properly," Nathan said. "With Alicia. Every line."
"And if it's real?"
"Then we deal with what's real." He looked round the painted kitchen, at the gulls flying at Leo-height towards the window, at the bear in the yellow raincoat waiting patiently in the studio for a hand that would not come back to finish him. "But a man who brings wine to a threat, Emma, is a man who knows his paper won't survive being read."
Chapter 9: Gary's Paper
Gary's paper arrived on Thursday, by courier, in an envelope so thick it had to be posted through Emma's letterbox in two attempts.
She did not open it alone. She waited until Leo was at school, drove to Alicia Grant's office with it on the passenger seat like a passenger, and laid it on the desk of Nathan's oldest friend from college with hands that were not quite steady.
Alicia read the way she did everything: fast, twice, the second time with a pencil.
"Right," she said at last. "Let me tell you what this claims, before I tell you what it is." She turned the document around. "A personal loan. Eighty-five thousand dollars, advanced to Sarah Collins by Gary Holt in March of last year, for medical expenses, repayable in twelve months, secured — and here's the poetry — on the Cannon Beach cottage, which would transfer to Gary if the loan wasn't repaid. Signed by Sarah. Witnessed by a neighbour of Gary's in Bend. Dated the fourteenth of March."
"March," Emma said. "Last March Sarah was —"
"Tell me."
"She was in hospital. She'd had the second surgery. She was in from the ninth to the twenty-second, and for half of it she couldn't hold a pen. She couldn't hold a cup. I was there every day. She did not sign a loan in Bend, three hours away, attached to that hospital by tubes."
Alicia asked for the March days in order, and Emma gave them the way she gave everything about that month, from a memory she had clearly built into a wall and furnished. The ninth, admission. The tenth, the surgery that was supposed to take two hours and took five. The eleventh, the twelfth, a corridor, a machine, Sarah's hand too swollen for her ring. "She dictated a shopping list on the eighteenth," Emma said. "For when she got home. Lemons. She was planning lemons, Alicia. She was not planning eighty-five thousand dollars." Alicia wrote it all down without looking up, and then she turned the loan document over and considered its back, the way she considered everything, as if paper had a tell. "The money was supposedly advanced in cash and by cheque," she said. "There is no cheque. There is no bank record in the disclosure that matches it, no withdrawal, nothing. A man lends eighty-five thousand dollars and keeps no proof he ever had it to lend. That is not lending, Emma. That is theatre with props."
Alicia was already writing. "Good. That's fact one, and it's checkable: admission records, surgical dates. Fact two —" she flipped the page over, held the signature up against the light from the window, and then took, from Emma's folder, a birthday card Sarah had sent Leo's teacher two years earlier, and laid the two signatures side by side. "Look. Don't touch. Look."
Emma looked. Her sister's signature had a gallop in it: the S tall and looping, the h finished with a flick that sometimes dotted the i in Collins by accident, gloriously, her whole life.
The signature on Gary's paper had the tall S. It had the flick. It had them the way a photocopy has a view.
"It's the same," Emma whispered. "It's exactly the same. That's worse, isn't it? If it was different, it would just be a lie. This is her, copied."
"It is her signature's shape," Alicia said carefully, "with none of its behaviour. A real signature changes every time a human writes it — speed, pressure, the little lifts of the pen. This one overlays. Watch." She slipped the loan page over the card on the lightbox she kept for exhibits, aligned the two names, and the shapes slid into each other like a key into its own lock. "Identical to the millimetre. Nobody signs identically twice, Emma. Not after chemo. Not ever. This was traced, or transferred, from some genuine document Sarah signed — and whoever did it had the genuine document to copy from."
The room went very quiet, except for Nathan, who had been standing at the window with his arms folded, captain-still, the way he stood in doorways at fires while he decided which wall to trust.