AllFreeNovel
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The future children bit kind of hit me right in the chest, and I sat there silent.
“We can take that,” Zilla said and took the box off the desk and balanced it on her lap. She was clear these days. Present. The summer stay at Belhaven long behind her. She was doing what the doctors told her, and in the months since Jim shot himself, she’d been indispensable to me.
Not because she made me tea and helped me send thank you notes and boxed up the senator’s clothes for donation, but because she went for long walks with me in the cold spring March mornings.
“Do you want to go back?” I’d ask her.
“Nope,” she’d lie through pale lips.
She made dinner out of things I hadn’t had in two years. Pizza delivered to our door. Macaroni and cheese. Veggies dipped in ranch dressing. Goldfish crackers. The food of that summer. Of our childhood.
Freedom.
Because in the middle of the night when I left the king-size bed I’d shared with Jim and crawled into the guest bed with her, she didn’t say anything. She put her arm around me and curled up tight.
And she didn’t ask me if I was all right. Everyone in the world was asking me if I was all right, but she knew that everything I was feeling was so much more complicated than just ‘all right.’
I wasn’t happy or sad. Or relieved. I was nauseous and scared. Jumpy. Unsure. A rabbit out of its cage. I was a mess, and she knew it. And didn’t try to change it.
She just took care of me.
“The will is very straightforward,” he said, adjusting his Keebler glasses on his nose. He left it all to a charity, I thought. To his foundation. He left it to another woman. He left it to another woman, and he sold me to another man.
God, I was really spiraling.
“As his only family and heir, you get everything,” he said, flipping through a file. “The house. The cars. The bank accounts, equalling—” He turned another page. “5.2 million.”
He looked at us over the top of his glasses. Zilla shook her head, and I found it hard to breathe. “Dollars?” Zilla finally asked.
“Yes,” he said with a smile. “That’s standard.”
“What’s the catch?” I asked.
“There . . . ah . . . is no catch,” he said, glancing at Zilla and back at me.
“No.” I stood, panicked and more scared than I was before. “There’s a catch. There’s always a catch.” Every gift from him was a double-edged sword. Nothing was free. Nothing was safe.
“With the senator?” he asked.
“Does it say my name? Show me—”
“Poppy,” Zilla said, reaching out to touch my arm. “Calm down.”
“It’s right here,” he said. Standing up and holding out the paper. “He wrote his will just after you were engaged. He was very clear. His wife would get everything. Are you all right?”
“Perhaps if we could have a second,” Zilla said.
“No. No. Let’s just do this.” I wanted to go home. The rabbit longing for her cage.
I signed paperwork where he pointed as the truth hovered somewhere above real comprehension in my brain. An hour later, we carried the box out with us. I could only sit in Zilla’s car.
“Poppy?” Zilla said.
“Yeah?”
“You’re rich. You’re rich, and you’re free.”
“I am,” I said, watching the rain hit the windshield and splatter.
“You still think there’s a catch?” she asked.
“There always is.”
“Maybe . . . the catch was everything before? Being married to him. Maybe – karmically – you’ve already paid for this. Maybe this is only good.”
I actually laughed at her.
“Pops. You have everything he had. It’s all yours now.”
“Everything,” I said.
“It hasn’t sunk in?”
“Not even a little.”
Zilla started the car. “It will. Just give it some time.”
We pulled out of the small parking lot behind the lawyer’s office and headed for the road up the hill to the mansions. My mansion. Zilla chatted away about dinner and maybe getting a bottle of champagne, and her words flowed over and through me. Until there was only one truth left. The one I’d been pushing away and pretending didn’t exist.
“You need to go home. Back to the city,” I blurted.
“What?” she said, looking at me and then back at the road. “What are you talking about?”
“You can’t babysit me forever. I need to move on, and you need to go back to your life.”
“I want to stay,” Zilla said. “I should stay.”
I wanted her to stay so badly I could taste it. The house was warmer when she was in it. I felt less like Jim’s widow and more like . . . I don’t know. Something between Jim’s wife and that girl I’d been. But I wasn’t either of those things anymore.
I was something else entirely. And it was time to figure out what that was.
And Zilla finally had her feet under her. I couldn’t take that away because I was lonely.
