"She was afraid of me," Margaret said. It was not a question.
"She was afraid of losing him," Emma said. "She thought rich people could take things in court. She was twenty-eight, pregnant, and then a policeman came. After that she wasn't thinking like a strategist. And every year, telling you got bigger."
"I would have —" Margaret stopped. Honesty, in her family, was a new and painful exercise. "I don't know what I would have done. I was not always kind to the son I had. His choices frightened me, so I called them phases."
Margaret looked toward the bedroom door, where Nathan's voice went on, low and steady, doing the lighthouse keeper's voices wrong on purpose to make a tired boy laugh.
"He sounds like his father did, reading," she said. "Daniel used to read to Nathan when Nathan had flu, even as teenagers. Nobody believes me."
"I believe you," Emma said.
When Leo was asleep, Margaret stood in the doorway of the little bedroom and looked at her grandson under a blanket printed with rockets, one arm flung out, Daniel's teddy — after another negotiation — sitting on the chair beside the bed, facing the door, on guard.
"He has your son's whole face," Emma said softly, "and Sarah's whole heart. You'll have to get used to both of them correcting you."
"I can be corrected," Margaret said. "It appears I have been practicing on the wrong people for years." She turned, and took Emma's hand, awkwardly, as if hand-holding were a foreign custom she was determined to learn. "Thank you. For not slamming this door. I slammed so many, in that family, by not opening them. Ask me for anything. Money, a house, lawyers —"
"Time," Emma said. "Ask granted if it's time. He needs people who stay. That's the whole list, Margaret. It's a short list and it's the hardest one in the world."
"Then I shall stay," Margaret said, "if I am permitted," and she said it like a vow, and meant it like one.
Chapter 8: The House Sarah Kept
They went back to Cannon Beach the following weekend to work, and the cottage, this time, did not feel like a shrine. It felt like a job.
Emma had a notebook. Nathan had brought tools, bin liners, and Derek, who took one look at the gutters, said, "Your sister-in-law had excellent taste and terrible ladders," and was forgiven everything for letting Leo hand him screws one at a time, gravely, like surgical instruments.
Inside, Nathan could finally see what Sarah had made of the place. She had painted everywhere, the way an illustrator lives inside her own book: gulls along the kitchen wall at Leo-height, a lighthouse inside the pantry door, and in Leo's bedroom a whole mural — a harbour at morning, a white boat with a blue stripe, and on the dock a man, a woman and a very small boy holding hands, painted small, as if she hadn't quite dared to make them bigger.
"She did that the winter he turned four," Emma said from the doorway. "She said if he couldn't have the real harbour, he'd have one that stayed."
Her studio was the back room, north-lit, fiercely ordered in a way the rest of the house was not. Jars of brushes stood in regiments. A drawing board still held a half-finished page: a bear in a yellow raincoat, looking up. On the wall, pinned in rows, were the covers of her books — eleven of them — and below them, in a folder Emma had never opened, a sheaf of letters on heavy paper with a Portland developer's letterhead.
Nathan read the top one, then the next. The offers had begun two years ago and doubled since: the cottage, the land, the lane. A boutique hotel. A "curated coastal retreat". The last letter, dated three weeks before Sarah's death, used the phrase "given your circumstances" twice.
"She never said a word," Emma said. "Not one word. She owed me money twice and told me. This — nothing."
"She was keeping it clean," Nathan said slowly. "If she never answered, they couldn't say she negotiated. She wanted it to come to Leo with no arguments attached. That's what the will's for."
"If we can find the will."
They worked through the afternoon — files, receipts, Leo's drawings in every drawer like a second, secret wallpaper. Derek fixed the porch step. Emma found Sarah's good scissors, cried for four minutes in the bathroom, efficiently, and came out and made sandwiches.
Leo appointed himself foreman of the works at lunchtime, with a page torn from Emma's notebook and a pencil he kept behind his ear, where it fell out roughly every four minutes. His list, read aloud at intervals, ran: PORCH. WINDOW THAT STICKS. MR WEBB UNDER THE HOUSE, QUESTION MARK. He supervised Derek's gutter work from the ladder's foot with his arms folded, and when Nathan came out of the studio carrying nothing — he had stood in there a full minute with his hands at his sides, in front of the unfinished bear, and had not trusted himself to touch so much as a brush — Leo studied his empty hands and nodded, once, like a foreman who respected a man for knowing which jobs weren't his. In the kitchen they found tins Sarah had labelled in her round hand: SOUP — LEO, WINTER. PEACHES — EMERGENCY, GOOD MOOD REQUIRED. Even her stores had an audience, Emma said, half laughing. Even her cupboards were told who they were for.
Gary Holt arrived at four o'clock, without warning, in a car too clean for the lane.
He came up the path with a bottle of wine and the smile of a man who has been practising being family in a mirror. He was sixty, silver at the temples, with their mother's eyes and none of her kindness. He kissed Emma's cheek before she could step back.
"Pumpkin," he said. "Look at this place. She kept it standing, your sister. Stubborn as her mother." His eyes travelled over Nathan and priced him. "And you must be the fireman. Or the father. Depending on which paper you read."
"I'm Nathan Reed," Nathan said. "Leo's uncle."
"Uncle." Gary tasted the word, amused. "Well. Families rearrange themselves, don't they? I did my best by those girls, whatever they've told you. Married their mother with two little kids and a mortgage. Nobody thanks the stepfather. That's the job."
"I haven't heard anything about you," Nathan said truthfully, "except that Leo goes quiet when your name comes up. Children are usually accurate."
Something moved behind Gary's eyes and was covered over, fast, with geniality. He set the wine down on Sarah's table like a claim staked in a country he intended to visit often.
Gary's gaze did the rounds of the kitchen while the pleasantries lasted, and it priced everything it touched: the mural wall, the studio door, the garden running down to the lane, the view. Nathan had seen that look at fire scenes, on men doing arithmetic in front of other people's ashes, and he moved — without hurry, without theatre — until he was standing where the look had to pass through him to reach Emma. "You've kept it nice, pumpkin," Gary said. "A place like this, kept nice, is worth a fortune to the right people. Shame for it to sit here eating money when it could be making some." "It's making a boy," Emma said. "He eats in it. He sleeps in it. That's what it's making." Gary smiled as if she had confirmed something useful to him, and Nathan understood that the visit was not the threat itself. The visit was the survey that came before the threat, and Gary had brought a bottle of wine the way other men brought a tape measure.
"I came about practicalities," he said. "Emma, you're a teacher with a class of seven-year-olds, a grieving boy, and a house that's eating money standing still. You're in over your head as guardian. Sarah knew it too, at the end. She came to me. We made an arrangement — a loan, for the medical bills, secured on this place. Sign the cottage over to settle it, keep Leo in Portland, and I'll even —"