Josh picked at a splinter on the step. "Dad shouts at Grandma sometimes. About the tin. He knows about the biscuit tin."
My blood went cold. "What does he say?"
"That she shouldn't have shown you. That some things are family business." Josh looked up at me. "I don't like it when he shouts at her."
I put my hand on his shoulder, and he didn't pull away. "Thank you for telling me," I said. "Your grandma is lucky to have you in her corner."
After he went inside, I sat on the porch for a long time, thinking about what Josh had told me. Mark knew about the tin. That meant Margaret wasn't just living with a man who'd taken her house — she was living with a man who was angry at her for telling the truth about it. The house felt less safe than it had that morning, and I hadn't thought that was possible.
I called Ellen from my car, where no one could overhear.
"Mark knows about the tin," I said. "Josh told me he's been shouting at Mom about it."
Ellen was quiet for a moment. "Is your mother in immediate danger?"
I thought about it honestly. "No. He's a bully when he's cornered, not — he's not that. But she's frightened, Ellen. I can see it."
"Then we document it," Ellen said. "Write down what Josh told you, with the date. And Diane — this is exactly why we offered the process. The angrier he gets, the more important it is that everything goes through proper channels. Nine more days."
"Nine more days," I repeated.
That night I bought a simple lock for Margaret's bedroom door at the hardware store. I told myself it was practical, not dramatic. But my hands shook a little as I paid for it, because I knew what it meant: I was putting a lock on my mother's bedroom door in her own house, against my own brother.
Some homecomings don't look like the brochures.
Chapter 13: Tina Softens
The lock changed something — not just for Margaret, but for Tina.
I installed it on a Saturday afternoon while Mark was at the dealership. It was a simple deadbolt, the kind you can buy for twenty dollars, and I fitted it carefully, testing it three times. Margaret stood in the hallway watching me, her arms crossed, her mouth a thin line.
"I've lived in this house for thirty years and never locked a bedroom door," she said.
"I know, Mom."
"Your father would have had opinions."
"I know that too."
She was quiet while I swept up the wood shavings. Then she said, very softly, "Thank you."
That night, Margaret locked her door for the first time in her life. I sat in the hallway outside until I heard her breathing go slow and even through the wood, and then I went to my own room and cried — not loudly, not the way you cry when someone's watching, but the quiet, leaking kind, into my pillow, for my mother behind a locked door in her own house.
Tina found me in the kitchen the next morning, early, before anyone else was up. She put the kettle on without asking, which was answer enough — she knew.
"I saw the lock," she said.
I waited.
"I never wanted the house this way," Tina said, staring at the kettle as if it might rescue her. "When Mark brought those papers home, he said it was to protect Mom. That if anything happened to her, the house would be safe with us instead of tied up in — in legal things. He said she'd be looked after. And I wanted to believe him, Diane. God help me, I wanted to believe him, because the alternative was that my husband had stolen his mother's house, and I didn't know how to live with that."
The kettle clicked off. She didn't move to pour.
"He promised me she'd be looked after," Tina repeated. "And then I watched her scrubbing the floor while we watched television, and I understood what his promises were worth."
I thought about Ellen's advice — don't weaponize Tina's discomfort — and I thought about the woman in front of me, who had signed for the demand letter with her careful, legible signature and who was now standing in a kitchen at dawn telling me the truth.
"Thank you for telling me," I said. It was what I'd said to Josh, and it was true both times. "I know that wasn't easy."
"Mark doesn't know I'm talking to you," she said. "He'd — I don't know what he'd do. He's not himself lately. Or maybe he is himself, and I'm just finally seeing it."
"Tina," I said carefully, "whatever happens with the house, you and Josh are welcome in my mother's life. That's not a tactic. That's just true."
She poured the tea with unsteady hands, and we drank it standing up, two women in a quiet kitchen, on opposite sides of a fight that was really about a man neither of us had fully understood.