After she left for work, I wrote down everything she'd said, with the date, the way Ellen had taught me. Not as a weapon. As a record. There was a difference, and I was learning it.
That afternoon, Margaret came into the kitchen while I was working at the table and put her hand on my shoulder.
"Tina's a good woman," my mother said. "She married a complicated man, but she's a good woman."
"I know," I said.
"Be gentle with her," Margaret said. "She's going to need someone gentle, when this is over. It won't be Mark. Not at first."
I looked up at my mother — seventy-one, behind a locked door at night, scrubbing floors by day not long ago — and marveled, not for the first time, at how much clearer she saw everyone than they saw themselves.
"I'll be gentle," I promised.
And I meant it. Tina's softening wasn't a crack in Mark's armor to exploit. It was a woman finding her way back to herself, and the least I could do was not get in her way.
Chapter 14: Mark's Answer
Mark's answer arrived on the thirteenth day, through a lawyer.
Ellen called me the moment it came in. "He's retained counsel," she said. "That's actually good news — it means he's taking this seriously. I'm sending you the response. Read it once, then call me."
The response was four pages long, on heavy letterhead, and I read it standing in the driveway because I couldn't make myself go inside. The gist was this: Margaret had known exactly what she was signing. The medication had been mild — the lawyer had somehow gotten hold of a pharmacy summary, or Mark had provided one, carefully selective. Diane had abandoned the family for six years in Singapore, contributing nothing but money, and had no standing to disrupt her mother's chosen arrangements. The demand for rescission was rejected in full.
I read it twice, the way I'd promised myself I would, and felt the sting of the true part spread through me like ink in water.
Abandoned the family for six years.
I had sent money every month. I had called every Sunday. I had flown home for Christmas twice and for my father's funeral — no, my father had died nine years ago, before Singapore. I had flown home for Margaret's surgery, stayed two weeks, hired the home-care aide for the recovery, and flown back. I had done all the things a good daughter does from six thousand miles away, and I had told myself it was enough, and Mark's lawyer had taken that private knowledge and printed it on letterhead.
I sat in the rental car with the pages in my lap and felt six years of guilt rise up like a tide. Maybe Mark was right. Maybe I had no business coming home and turning everything upside down. Maybe the house, the tin, the lawyer — maybe it was all just my guilt looking for something to fix.
Then my phone rang. It was Margaret.
"Where are you?" she asked. "Your tea's getting cold."
"I'm in the driveway, Mom."
"Well, come inside. It's going to rain."
I went inside. Margaret had made tea — actual tea, in the pot, not Tina's dawn kitchenette version — and she set a cup in front of me and sat down across the table, and she looked at me the way she'd looked at me when I was sixteen and convinced I'd ruined my life over a bad grade.
"Ellen called," she said. "She told me about the letter."
"Mark's lawyer says I abandoned the family."
"And what do you say?"
I stared into my tea. "I say there's a true part. I was gone, Mom. For six years. I sent money and I called, but I wasn't here. When you had the surgery, I stayed two weeks and left. When Mark moved in, I didn't ask enough questions. I let distance do my worrying for me."
Margaret was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Do you remember when you were nine and you broke Mrs. Gable's window with a baseball?"
"Mom —"
"You came home crying, and you said you'd pay for it out of your allowance, and I said the money wasn't the point. Do you remember what I said the point was?"
I did remember. "You said the point was that I came home and told the truth."
"Well," my mother said, "you came home. You're telling the truth. The money you sent for six years kept a roof over my head, and don't you let your brother's lawyer tell you otherwise. But you're here now, Diane. That's the part that counts. That's the part I'm counting."
I cried then — properly, at the kitchen table, in front of my mother, the way I hadn't cried since I was nine. She came around the table and held me, and she was smaller than I remembered, and stronger than I'd given her credit for.