Page 106 of What Remains of Grace

“I’m calling a probate and property attorney tomorrow morning. We need someone who knows the process from start to finish. Someone who can tell us what real leverage we have. And we do have some.”

Emmie turned slightly. “Like what?”

“Like the fact that he contributed nothing to the house for years. Nothing to the bakery. That he lived elsewhere. That he effectively abandoned the marriage. That he showed up after she died to take cars and leave again. That we’ve maintained everything. That Grace’s family, me and you, have kept both properties running.”

Emmie’s chin wobbled. “But the law doesn’t care about emotions.”

“No,” Jenna said delicately. “But it does care about facts. Documentation. Equity. Contribution. Precedent. Judges look at a hundred things before forcing a sale. This isn’t as open-and-shut as he thinks.”

Emmie looked down. “I don’t . . . I don’t want to lose this house.”

“You won’t,” Jenna said with more confidence than she felt. “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that never happens.”

“And the bakery?” Emmie whispered.

Jenna fought the lump in her throat and nodded. “The bakery too.”

Emmie took a slow, shaky breath. Then another. Then she straightened her shoulders.

“Okay,” she said. Her voice was still hoarse, but steadier. “Okay. Fine. We’ll do it your way first. Lawyers. Facts. Documentation. But listen to me.”

She turned fully toward Jenna, eyes blazing with a fire that reminded her so much of Grace it broke something inside her.

“If he tries to take one more thing that belonged to my mother,” Emmie said quietly, fiercely, “I will go nuclear. I don’t care who he hires or how much money he has. I don’t care what he threatens. I don’t care what I have to sell or how many hours I have to work or how determined I have to learn to be.”

Jenna swallowed hard.

“I will do anything,” Emmie vowed, her dark eyes hardening as a flush rose across her olive skin, “anything, to keep him from getting his hands on the last pieces of her life.”

Jenna cupped the side of her face gently. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” she whispered. “Together.”

Emmie nodded once, sharp, resolute.

The envelope sat on the table between them. A declaration of war neither of them had asked for. But the Hart women were not backing down.

Not this time.

Not ever.

27

The Secret Society

If anyone had told Cole Bennett six months ago that he’d be sitting at a bakery table with a teenage girl and a legal pad, planning a small-town resistance movement, he probably would’ve laughed.

But life, turns out, had a sense of humor.

“Okay,” Emmie said, leaning over the screen with a focused frown. “So if the appraiser’s right, and the house plus the bakery is, what, eight hundred grand combined—”

“Seven-fifty,” Cole corrected, pen tapping the margin. “On the low end.”

“Fine. Seven-fifty,” she said. “Twenty-five percent of that is still . . . a disgusting number.”

“About one-eighty-seven,” Cole said. “Call it one-ninety. Roughly.”

“Roughly,” she muttered. “I don’t even have one-ninety in my Sims account.”

They were hunched in the corner booth at The Blue Cypress after closing. The front lights were dimmed, and the chairs were flipped upside down on most of the tables. The only light came from the kitchen and the brass pendant over their heads, casting a soft pool of yellow across the legal pad between them. Jenna had gone to her parents’ house to drop off a copy of the legal paperwork—her father had demanded to look it over, and her mother had insisted on feeding her a real meal.