Page 5 of The Inheritance At Bourton

Whitfield looked at her for a moment. Then he leaned back in his chair.

"Your father paid his bills on time for forty years," he said. "Finding paper is cheap. Court is expensive. Let's find the paper and keep it cheap." He stood, and they stood. He shook her hand again at the door. "He spoke of you," he added.

“He didn’t know me,” she said.

She didn’t mean to sound rude, but it was true. She was still upset that he had never tried to talk to her.

She blinked back tears on the way back to the truck. Rowan didn't say anything, just fell into step beside her and opened the truck door for her when they reached it.

She stared out the window and ran through all the what-ifs. Life taught her to brace for the worst. If Madeline's money outlasted her nerve, she could be out of that house by Christmas. Homeless in a matter of weeks—again.

She'd survived worse. But she had actually allowed herself to think that those days were behind her.

She pressed her forehead against the cool glass. Not again. She was not going to be evicted from her own father's house by a woman with a personal vendetta.

When they got back, she went straight to the library. Her laptop was still open on the desk where she'd left it, the half-finished business plan on the screen. She looked at it for a long moment. Then she closed the lid.

Rowan stood in the doorway. "You're not quitting."

"I'm not quitting. I'm pausing." She took a deep breath. "There's no point ordering bulbs for a garden I might not own by spring." She looked around the library. "Every plan I make from here forward depends on one question. So we answer the question first."

He didn't argue.

She took a breath.

"I understand why you do it," she said. "The managing. The decision about what I can handle and when. You've spent your whole life taking care of this place and the people in it. You took care of my father. It's who you are. I get it. I do." She kept her voice level. "But it has to stop. With me, it has to stop. No more deciding on my behalf. No more protecting me from my life. If it's mine to know, I need to know it. Even when it's bad. Especially when it's bad."

He nodded. "I know. I'm sorry."

"I know you are," she said. "I'm still angry."

"All right."

"That's going to take a minute. I'm not going to pretend otherwise."

He offered a small smile. “Expected.”

“We're too old to let one bad night ruin the best thing we have." She forced herself to meet his eyes. "Last night happened. I don't regret it. I want to see where this goes. But from now on, I need honesty. Total honesty. If I have broccoli in my teeth, tell me. If my zipper’s down or my butt looks big, tell me. Everything. That's the deal."

He chuckled. “I could not possibly be rude.”

“I’m too old to be offended by the truth,” she said with a sigh. “I mean, I’m not asking you to insult me, but just be straight. Trust me, there is little you could do or say that I haven’t heard before. I survived then; I’ll survive now.”

"Deal," he said.

"I'm not very good at asking for help," she added. "So we're both going to have to learn some new tricks."

"That is a fair assessment of the situation."

They went to the kitchen. It was what they did—every plan they'd ever made had happened at that table. So many lists. They sat down side by side with a blank page between them, and she wrote PROOF at the top in capital letters.

"Birth certificate," she said, and wrote it down. "I have one. Somewhere. It's in the document folder I brought from Seattle—passport, birth certificate, all of it in one of the boxes upstairs.”

"Marriage certificate," Rowan said.

"We have it. I'll photograph it and put the original somewhere safe." She wrote it down. "Somewhere that isn't between the pages of a book, no offense to my father's filing system."

He chuckled. “I should have bought him a filing cabinet.”