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My mother stood at the counter mixing a martini in a pale green blouse, navy slacks, and pearls. My father walked in with a glass in one hand and his sleeves rolled to his forearms. Both of them looked up.

“There you are,” my mother said. “You’re wet.”

“It’s raining.”

“I gathered that from the water falling out of the sky. I meant your hair.”

My father laughed. “Want a towel, sweetheart?”

Sweetheart nearly undid me.

I set my purse on a chair. “I need to talk to you.”

Something in my voice made my mother put down the jar of olives as my father took a sip of his scotch. “All right.”

I’d made speeches in the car. Calm, adult speeches designed to keep me from crying.

Then I looked at my father, healthy and worried and very much alive, and every one of them disappeared.

“When were you going to tell me about the trust?”

My mother looked at my father.

I laughed once. “Of course. You both knew.”

“Lorrie,” he began.

“Please. Just answer me. When were you going to tell me? I don’t care about the money. I care that everyone seems to know about my life except me.”

“Before the wedding,” she said.

“There isn’t going to be any wedding.”

She barely paused. “Before there would have been a wedding.”

“When? The rehearsal dinner? After Paul proposed in front of half the club? While someone passed the champagne?”

“Laura Catherine.”

“No.” My voice cracked, and I took a breath. “I’m asking a serious question.”

My father came around the island but stopped a few feet away.

“The trust was established by your grandfather,” he said. “It was always yours, but it was structured so you wouldn’t have full control too young. We planned to explain everything when marriage became a practical matter or when you were older.”

“A practical matter.”

“It’s a significant amount of money,” Mom said. “We didn’t want it affecting you.”

I stared at her.

“You didn’t want it affecting me, so you let everyone else know about it instead?”

She flinched.

“That wasn’t what we meant to do,” he said.

“But Paul knows. Alan knows. Does Patricia?”