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“Of course it’s not her fault! It’s Mom’s fault, just like the rest of this god-awful mess!” my mother shouted. “Leave it to Asteria to cause more trouble dead than alive.”
“That’s not fair!” Rhi cried out, her voice thick with tears.
“You’re right! None of this is fair! Or sane! This is absolute lunacy and I won’t stay here to listen to another minute of it. Wren, grab your things, we’re leaving.”
She marched straight for the door without looking at me. Something inside of me snapped and I jumped to my feet, Freya held tightly in my arms.
“No!”
My mother froze as she was about to open the door and turned. “Excuse me?”
“I said, no! We can’t just leave! It’s not going to solve anything!”
My mother took a deep breath, her knuckles white on the brass doorknob. “Wren, we can’t stay here. This is…”
“I know,” I said quietly. “It’s a mess. But if we leave it will still be a mess. We have to… to sort it all out.”
My mother looked for a moment like she might shout at me, and I held my breath. But then suddenly her shoulders sagged and she dropped her head with a sigh that seemed to expel every ounce of fight left in her.
“Okay. You’re right. We… we have to figure this out. But once we do—”
“We go home,” I finished for her, nodding.
My mother deigned to come back into the room, but she didn’t seem able to sit, choosing instead to pace back and forth behind the sofa while we listened to the rest of the reading. The words washed over me, full of complicated legal terminology I didn’t understand. Then, when it was all over, Lydian pushed the box across the table toward Rhi.
“The final bequest is in that box, and your mother has left it to her three daughters,” she said. “And she wanted to make sure I put it into your hands at the reading, just in case.”
Rhi looked down at the box in bewilderment. “In case of what?” she asked.
“In case you need to use it,” Lydian clarified.
Frowning, Rhi lifted the cover of the box and shifted aside the blue velvet fabric. I couldn’t see what she was looking at. Her eyes widened, and she turned to look over her shoulder at my mother, who paused in her pacing and stepped forward to look into the box as well. I watched my mother’s expression harden until she resembled a statue of herself, carved from stone. She clenched her hands, and then loosened them again before nodding once, curtly.
“Very well. You’ve given it to us. Is there anything else?” Rhi asked. She sounded exhausted.
“I’ll need to see Wren and Kerri at my office over the next few days to go over some paperwork; but for today, there’s just this.” Lydian reached into the voluminous depths of her caftan and produced a small manila envelope. She held it out to me. “Go on, then, child,” she barked when I just sat there staring at it.
I forced my hand out toward her and she deposited the envelope into my grasp. It was heavier than I expected and made a strange clanking sound. I unwound the string that held the top of the envelope closed and tipped it upside down onto my palm. A large ring of mismatched keys fell out.
“What’s this?” I asked blankly.
Lydian rolled her eyes. “The keys to your new property, of course.”
I looked down at them, suddenly wishing I could give them back. I didn’t want the keys. I didn’t want the cottage. I didn’t want to be the one responsible for tearing my mother and her sisters even further apart than they’d already managed to run from each other. But I couldn’t say any of that, not into the loaded, sorrowful silence of the room. And so instead, I slid the keys back into the envelope and tied it up with the string again.
“Thank you,” I muttered.
“Well, I ought to be getting along, then,” Lydian said, and I yelped in surprise as her two granddaughters jumped to their feet. They’d been so motionless and silent that I’d literally forgotten they were still sitting there. Now they fussed over Lydian, offering hands to help her up, and arms for her to lean on as she crossed the room to the door. She batted them away like irksome flies, although she did allow them to hold the door open for her as she shuffled across the threshold. Persi was standing just outside on the porch, smoking a clove cigarette.
“I’m sorry this has been such an ordeal for you girls,” Lydian said. “But I had to discharge my duty.”
“It’s not your fault, Lydian,” Rhi said.
“We’re sorry you had to be in the middle of all of this,” my mother added.
Persi, however, was still looking to cast blame. “Why the hell didn’t you talk her out of it, for goddess’s sake?” she muttered. Maybe she thought Lydian wouldn’t catch her words, for she started in alarm when Lydian turned to glare at her.
“Persephone Vesper, no one ever talked your mother out of anything once she’d made up her mind, and you damn well know it,” she said. Then she looked at me. “My office, this week, you hear me, young Vesper?”
