Chapter 10

My testimony took two days.

I sat in the same courthouse hall where Dr. Pell had called me a confabulation and told it in order, with dates and rooms and the names of the tea, and the wire of the locket chain cutting into my hand while I spoke. The fuel line went in as evidence. The recorder went in as evidence. Tessa testified. Warren Sills testified, and produced my father's will from his safe under subpoena, and resigned his practice on the courtroom steps before lunch.

Grant settled his charges rather than take a jury: fraud, forgery, false imprisonment. Celia went to trial and lost, because six minutes and eleven seconds of her own voice does not leave a jury much to argue with. Milo pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years with credit for cooperation, and he wrote me one letter that I have never answered and never thrown away.

On the thirtieth day, the bidders came back to the terrace.

Not for a wedding this time. The sale contract had never been executed - the money had never cleared the trust - so the buyers and their lawyers came up the drive in their wet cars with their gold pens, expecting a signature, because men like that always expect the woman in the gray dress to sign eventually.

I climbed onto the auction block where Grant had stood with his gavel, and I read the preamble out loud so everybody on the terrace could hear it, and then I tore the contract in half, and in half again, and let the pieces go over the railing into the grass.

Harrowgate stays. The orchards stay. Ninety days of back wages to every person who worked in that house while I was Elsie, effective immediately, and a permanent job to anyone who wants one.

One of the Manhattan lawyers asked me who I thought I was.

I held up the locket and opened it for him - the bent clasp, the initials, my mother's hair still in it after twenty years.

"I am Evelyn Margaret Harrow," I said. "This is my house. Ask anyone here."

I drove upstate the following Tuesday to the correctional facility in A-block and sat across a scratched steel table from Milo Vance for forty minutes. I thanked him for the truth. I told him his sentence was fair and that I would not be writing a letter to shorten it, and he nodded like a man who had already accepted that. Then I told him the boathouse would still be standing when he came home, and that the channel is three feet deep at the bar at low tide, in case he had forgotten.

He laughed, once, with his hands flat on the table.

I walked back into Harrowgate through the east doors that evening, past my mother's portrait, past the piano room. The east wing was unlocked. Someone had tuned the Steinway while I was gone.

I stood in the corner room with the faded peonies and the fog rolling up the river, and I closed the locket in my fist until the clasp clicked, and I put it in my pocket, and I left every door in that house open behind me.