Chapter 5

On Sunday morning I played the organ at St. Anselm's, the way I have since I was nineteen, and Audrey sat in the fourth pew on the aisle with her purse in her lap.

She caught me at coffee hour by the folding table with the doughnuts.

"Nora. There you are." She took my arm. "Gerald's been on the phone with the title company all week. He's got it all worked out."

"Has he," I said.

Gerald came up behind her with his coffee, ruddy and easy, white moustache, brown cardigan, the same brown shoes he wears for everything. "Nora," he said. "I've been meaning to talk to you about the house."

I waited.

"But I figured you'd want it handled quietly." He smiled. "You always did like things quiet."

I stood there in the church basement under the fluorescent lights and understood - or thought I understood - what I was looking at. The paperwork had Gerald's name on it. Gerald had money and a handshake that settled things in this valley. And Grant had told the family a story in which the whole idea was mine, so that when the truth surfaced I would be the one backing out of a family plan.

They had built it together. That's what I believed. My in-laws, who taught me to make their mother's stuffing, who drove two hours to sit with Wren so I could finish a tuning job. Something in me went hard and cold and permanent.

"Quiet," I said. "That's me."

That afternoon I skipped Sunday dinner for the first time in five years. Audrey texted twice. I didn't answer.

On Monday, Lena called. Grant's sister and I have always gotten along.

"Dad's been strange about the house," she said. "He asked me if I thought you were happy."

"He did."

"Twice. It's weird, right?"

I said it wasn't weird. I said I had to go.

Then I called Corinne Adair, an attorney on Market Street who had handled my grandmother's estate, and asked for an appointment.

She fit me in Tuesday at four. She listened to all of it without writing anything down, then asked to see the folder. She went through it page by page, and when she reached the back she stopped and held the listing agreement up to the light.

"Mrs. Bellamy," she said. "The only signature that matters on a sale of your house is yours. Nobody can close without it."

"Then why-"

"So ask yourself," Corinne said, "why the buyer thinks he already has it."