Michael mailed back a silver lighter Richard had once given him, with no note enclosed.

Peggy learned Oakwood slowly.

She found the path to the lake by smell before sight, then stood on the dock one cold morning and watched fog lift off the water in thin white bands.

The locked studio turned out to hold Richard’s cameras, labeled boxes of negatives, contact sheets, and journals about light, angles, and the weather on the days he photographed her.

The care in those rooms felt almost unbearable.

She spent one whole afternoon sitting on the studio floor between metal cabinets, furious at him for making devotion look so much like secrecy.

Marcus Chen drove out in October with pastries from the Milbrook diner and an apology he had clearly rehearsed.

He admitted Richard had told him the will would anger Peggy but had never revealed the separate trust.

‘I thought there might be another provision somewhere,’ he said.

‘I hoped there was.

I just didn’t know.’

Peggy poured him coffee and let him look at the first room of photographs.

When he wiped his eyes and pretended it was the autumn air, she did not embarrass him by noticing.

By November, she had replaced two rugs, planted bulbs along the front path, and moved the wedding photograph from her suitcase to the mantle.

Not the formal one from the church.

She chose another she found in the studio: the two of them in profile after the reception, caught in an unguarded second when Richard had said something that made her laugh with her head thrown back.

It seemed fairer.

Less polished.

More honest.

On the first snow of the season, Catherine came alone.

Peggy almost didn’t answer the knock.

When she did, Catherine stood on the porch in a dark coat without makeup, her face tired in a way Peggy had never seen.

She carried a flat archival box in both hands.

‘I found these in one of my father’s storage cabinets,’ she said.

‘They’re from before you married him.’

Inside were more photographs.

Not of Peggy this time, but of Richard in his twenties, awkward and almost open-faced, holding a camera beside a rusted truck.

A different man, or maybe simply a less defended version of the same one.

Catherine did not step fully inside.

‘I hated you for years,’ she said, staring past Peggy into the warm hallway.

‘Not because you did anything terrible.

Because he was easier with you than he ever was with us, and I thought if I made you the reason, I wouldn’t have to look at him.’

Peggy let the wind blow cold around them for a second before answering.

‘And now?’

Catherine swallowed.

‘Now I think he loved badly.

All the way to the end.’

It was not an apology exactly.

But it was the first honest thing Catherine had ever offered her, and Peggy knew enough about the Morrison family to recognize honesty when it limped in late.

She took the box.

‘Thank you.’

After Catherine left, Peggy put the old photographs on the studio table and stood looking at Richard’s younger face.

She could feel tenderness and anger sitting beside each other inside her now, no longer taking turns, no longer pretending one canceled the other out.

By spring, Oakwood no