demand.’

Steven stared.

‘Who are you?’

‘The attorney your father retained to administer the assets he kept outside probate.’

The sentence landed like a slap.

Catherine took a step back.

Michael swore under his breath.

Steven recovered first.

Men like Steven always did.

‘My father was heavily medicated.

If some last-minute documents appeared in a house none of us knew about, their validity can be challenged.’

‘You can try,’ Eliza said.

‘And if you do, I recommend watching the file your father prepared for exactly this moment.’

Peggy did not trust her voice, so she simply nodded toward the study.

They followed her in.

The room smelled faintly of cedar and old paper.

Peggy inserted the thumb drive with hands that were steadier now than they had been at the will reading.

When Richard’s face appeared on the screen, all three children went motionless.

He looked older than Peggy remembered him looking, thinner around the jaw, his skin gray beneath the lamplight.

But his eyes were clear.

‘If you are watching this,’ he began, ‘then you have gone to Oakwood because you learned there was more here than your motherless arithmetic expected.

Good.

Sit down and listen without interrupting for once in your lives.’

Michael actually did sit.

Catherine’s hand went to her throat.

Steven remained standing, jaw tight.

Richard continued.

He explained that Oakwood had never been a secret affair house, never an investment oversight, never a clerical error.

It was a property he bought because Peggy once described the sound of wind in trees as the only luxury she had ever truly wanted.

He said he had spent decades photographing her because she was the only person in his life who behaved the same when no one important was watching.

Then his voice sharpened.

‘My children, I gave you the estate you pursued with exhausting consistency.

The Brookline house you already divided in your minds.

The accounts you monitored.

The art you referenced by appraisal value rather than memory.

I am not punishing you by giving you what you most wanted.

I am simply refusing to let you call it injustice when the one thing I protected for Peggy is beyond your reach.’

Steven lunged toward the screen as if proximity might break the sentence apart.

‘This is insane.’

Richard kept talking over him, recorded and untouchable.

‘Steven, I guaranteed your failed development loan because you stood in my office and cried for the first time since you were twelve.

Catherine, I maintained the Cape house because you cared more about being the daughter who hosted than the woman who could afford her own view.

Michael, I paid three private debts you never knew I knew about.

None of you has been denied help.

What you have been denied is the fantasy that only you were owed it.’

No one moved.

Then Richard looked directly into the camera in a way that made Peggy feel, impossibly, that he was looking at her from the other side of the room.

‘Peggy, I failed you publicly in order to protect you privately.

I know what that sounds like.

It sounds like the sort of justification I used too often in life.

You deserved better than a strategy.

You deserved plain love spoken plainly.

This house is not repayment.

Nothing repays