Page 123 of Tessa and Nash

Her thumb pauses over the signatures.

McCoy. Long.

She can feel them through the glass.

Rusty sighs, bored, which is impressive given my heart is trying to climb out of my chest.

Mom steps back and pauses. It’s quiet for longer than I expected. Long enough that the kitchen clock starts sounding loud. Tick. Tick. Tick, counting down to… something.

I swallow hard. “Say something.”

“Your father used to call it the creek story,” she says finally. “Like it was folklore. Like if he named it small enough, it couldn’t bite us.”

My throat tightens. “So you knew.”

Mom exhales slowly. “I knew fragments.”

“Fragments,” I repeat, bitter.

“Nash.”

I hold her stare. “We’ve hated the Longs my whole life.”

“That goes both ways.”

“Yeah, and now I find out it started because two men were scared and made a handshake deal they didn’t put on paper, and then everybody after them just… dug in and sharpened it into a weapon.”

“Fear,” she says quietly. “Fear has a way of disguising itself as certainty.”

I blink. “What does that mean?”

“It means people convince themselves they’re right,” she says, “because it’s easier than admitting they’re afraid.”

My mind flashes to Dad’s note in the margin. Check access rights before development.

He knew.

He knew, and he still let us grow up believing the version that made us clean.

I swallow hard. “Why didn’t Dad fix it?”

Mom’s gaze goes distant, remembering a version of my father that isn’t here anymore.

“Because fixing it would mean reopening it,” she says. “And your father…” She pauses, the word carefully chosen. “He didn’t like wounds that wouldn’t stop bleeding.”

I let out a humorless laugh. “Well. That worked out great.”

Mom’s eyes flash. “Watch your tone.”

I press my lips together, then look down at the papers again because if I keep meeting her stare, I might say something I can’t take back.

“You heard fragments,” I say, quieter. “What fragments?”

Mom’s fingers tap the edge of the map once, absent.

“That the Longs had an understanding with your great-grandfather,” she says. “That the creek pasture wasn’t as simple as the deed lines. That there were winters the McCoys wouldn’t have survived without help.”

Help.