"Maybe," I said honestly. "But wherever you live, your grandma will still be your grandma. That doesn't change."
"Will you still — " He stopped.
"Will I still what?"
"Will you still come around? If we move. You're not going back to Singapore, are you?"
The question caught me off guard — not the content but the wanting underneath it. This boy, caught between his father and his grandmother, was asking if I would stay.
"I'm not going back to Singapore," I said, and realized as I said it that it was true, that it had been true for a while, that I'd just been waiting to say it out loud. "I'm staying, Josh. Whatever happens with the house, I'm staying."
He threw the ball once more, caught it, and stood up. "Grandma's lucky," he said, very quietly, and went inside.
I sat on the steps until the light changed, thinking about what it meant that a fifteen-year-old boy was the one in that house seeing most clearly. Mark was fighting for a house. Tina was finding her courage. Margaret was fighting for herself. And Josh — Josh was just trying to love his grandmother through it, and hoping the adults would stop shouting.
I would make sure, I promised myself, that whatever the mediation decided, Josh would know he hadn't been forgotten in the paperwork.
Chapter 16: A Lock for Margaret's Room
I have installed project infrastructure on three continents. I have overseen office fit-outs with forty contractors and a deadline measured in hours. None of it prepared me for the particular intimacy of installing a lock on my seventy-one-year-old mother's bedroom door.
I bought it on a Saturday morning at the hardware store on Main Street — a simple deadbolt, brushed nickel, twenty dollars and change. The clerk asked if I needed help with the installation, and I said no, thank you, I've done this before, which was true in the most technical sense and completely false in every sense that mattered.
Mark was at the dealership. Tina had taken Josh to get his hair cut. Margaret was in the living room with the television on low, pretending not to watch me carry my toolbox down the hall.
"You don't have to do this," she said as I measured the door.
"I know."
"It's my house. Or it was. Or it will be again." She rubbed her hands together, the way she did when she was working up to something. "A woman shouldn't need a lock inside her own home, Diane."
"No," I agreed, marking the drill points. "She shouldn't. And when this is over, you can take it off and use it as a paperweight. But right now, your brother's son told me Mark's been shouting at you about the tin, and I need you to be able to sleep."
Margaret was quiet while I drilled. The sound was loud in the small hallway, and I winced with every bit of it, as if the noise itself were an admission of failure. When I fitted the strike plate and tested the bolt — smooth, solid, final — I turned to find my mother crying silently, tears tracking down her face.
"Mom —"
"Your father hung that door," she said. "Thirty years ago. He was so proud of how true it hung. He'd check it every spring, like it might have wandered off in the winter." She touched the new deadbolt with one finger. "He'd have opinions about this."
"What would he say?" I asked softly.
She almost smiled. "He'd say, 'Margaret, if you need a lock, you put in a lock, and we'll talk about the opinions later.'" The smile faded. "He always said a house should make you feel safe. That's what he said when we bought our first place. Not an investment, not an asset — a place that makes you feel safe."
I put down the drill and hugged her, there in the hallway, with wood shavings on the floor and the smell of cut pine in the air.
"When this is over," I said, "we'll take it off together. And we'll hang the door true again, the way Dad would have wanted."
That night, Margaret locked her bedroom door for the first time in her life. I heard the bolt slide — a small, definitive sound — and then I sat in the hallway outside with my back against the wall, my laptop closed beside me, and waited until her breathing went slow and even on the other side of the wood.
I thought about Singapore then — about my apartment on the twenty-third floor with its view of the harbor, its keycard entry, its doorman. I had been so proud of that security, the kind you buy. I hadn't understood that the real security was this: sitting outside your mother's door, listening to her breathe, knowing the lock was between her and the shouting.
Sometime after midnight, I heard footsteps. Tina, in the hallway, in her nightgown, looking at me sitting there.
"Is she all right?" Tina whispered.