My family laughed at my military rank, called me an embarrassment, and looked almost relieved when two police officers arrived to arrest me.

Chapter 13

Samuel Levin’s office was in Lakewood, on the second floor of a brick building that had been built sometime in the sixties and had not been improved since approximately 1994.

Tiffany’s car was already in the lot when I pulled in—a small white SUV with a bumper sticker about plants. She was standing beside it in jeans, sneakers, and sunglasses, and it took me a second to understand what was wrong with the picture.

No makeup.

Hair pulled back badly, with one strand refusing to cooperate.

No phone pointed at anything.

“Morning,” she said.

“You look tired.”

“So do you.”

“Thank you.”

“You started it.”

The stairs creaked. The hallway smelled like carpet shampoo and old paper, that specific dusty-sweet smell of buildings where people have been filing things for half a century. A brass plate beside the door said SAMUEL J. LEVIN, ATTORNEY AT LAW. Below it, someone had added, by hand in a strip of label tape, EST. 1981.

“Is he even alive?” Tiffany whispered.

“Apparently.”

“What if he’s senile?”

“Then we’ll find out in the first four minutes.”

“God. You’re so—” She waved a hand at me. “Military about everything.”

“I answered the phone at 6:42. That’s the only military thing I’ve done today.”

“You checked your watch like four times in the parking lot.”

“I was checking the time.”

“That’s what a watch is for, and yet.”

The receptionist was a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a beaded chain who looked up, took us both in, and said, “You’re the Vale girls.”

“We are.”

“He’s expecting you. Conference room.” She pointed with a pen. “Coffee’s on the sideboard. It’s not good.”

It was not good. We drank it anyway.

The conference room had a long wooden table, wooden shelves, framed diplomas on the wall going yellow at the edges, a brass desk lamp, and actual paper calendars stacked in a wire rack beside the phone. It looked like a room where no one had ever once worried about what a room ought to look like.

Samuel Levin came in slowly, one hand on the doorframe.

He was eighty-one years old and did not look it—or rather, he looked exactly it, but the way a stone wall looks old, in a manner that suggested he would still be standing when a great deal else was not. White hair, close-cut. A cardigan under his jacket. Eyes that were entirely awake behind thick glasses.

He stopped in front of me.

“Nora.”

I blinked. “You know me?”

“I met you when you were six.”

“That hardly counts.”

“It counts when you remember the person,” he said, and smiled toward Tiffany. “And you were three, and extremely angry, because your sister had taken the purple crayon, and you had decided that the correct legal remedy was to hit her with the box.”

Tiffany pointed at me immediately.

“Pattern of misconduct.”

“Your grandmother,” Samuel said, “told that story for thirty years.”

Something in my chest moved.

He gestured us to sit, and then sat down himself with the careful economy of a man who has negotiated with his own knees and lost some of the arguments.

On the table between us lay four envelopes.

Sealed.

White, ordinary, the kind you buy in a box of a hundred.

And on the front of each, in handwriting I would have known anywhere, a name.

Warren. Elaine. Tiffany. Nora.

My throat closed.

“You knew we were coming,” I said.

“No.”

“You—” I gestured at the envelopes. “They’re already out.”

“I took them out this morning because I have been trying to reach your father for nearly two months,” Samuel said, “and I have learned that when he finally answers the phone, it is unwise to be unprepared.”

Tiffany and I looked at each other.

“He didn’t mention that,” she said.

“I’m not surprised.”

Samuel said it without judgment. Just a fact, stated with forty-five years of practice. He folded his hands on the table.

“I handled your grandparents’ legal affairs for four decades. Your grandfather’s estate. The business incorporation. Your grandmother’s will and trust. And I came to know your father, over the years, in the way that lawyers come to know clients—which is to say, I know what he does and I do not know what he feels, and he has always preferred it that way.”

“Did he answer you?” I asked.

“Twice. Both times to say he would call back.”

“And?”

“He did not call back,” Samuel said mildly. “I am not offended. Some men find lawyers difficult to speak with.”

“Who doesn’t?” Tiffany said.

“Lawyers, occasionally.”

On the table, my envelope sat with my name on it. Under it, the wood was scratched and worn, and I found myself staring at the scratches instead of the envelope, because looking at the envelope directly was doing something to my breathing.

I touched it.

It was lighter than I expected. Ordinary. A single sheet of paper cannot weigh much.

I had spent eleven years in rooms where the smallest object on a table was frequently the most dangerous thing in the room. I had an entire professional vocabulary for it. Yet I sat in a Lakewood conference room on a Saturday morning and could not bring myself to open a letter from my dead grandmother.

“Why weren’t these delivered?” I asked, to buy time.

“The trust instructed me to deliver them when Warren’s trusteeship ended.”

“That was about two months ago.”

“Yes.”

“You knew.”

“I did.”

Samuel sighed—not dramatically, just the exhale of a man who had been waiting a long while for a conversation he had wanted to have sooner.

“Unfortunately, your father disagreed with my interpretation of that clause.”

“Why?”

“He believed the trusteeship continued until the property had been fully distributed.”

“It doesn’t.”

“No.”

“Did Frye know that?”

Samuel looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read.

“I don’t know Mr. Frye,” he said.

That should have reassured me.

It did not.

Tiffany shifted in her chair, and then, because she had never in her life been able to leave a silence alone, she asked the question I had come here to ask.

“Mr. Levin. What about Thomas?”

And Samuel Levin went still.

Not dramatically. Not with a jolt or a wide eye. Just—still. The way a lake goes still when the wind drops. His hands stopped moving, and his eyes came up, and for the first time since we walked in, he looked at us as though he were deciding something with real consequences.

“What did your father tell you?”

“That Thomas was his brother.”

“That is true.”

“And that he doesn’t know what happened to him.”

Samuel nodded slowly, and his eyes went past us, to the window, to the parking lot and the gray Denver sky beyond.

“That,” he said, “is also true.”