"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 —"
"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?"