"Good," I said. "He needs his father to be someone he can look up to again."
We didn't hug. When I stood up to go inside, Mark caught my sleeve — just for a second, just a brush of his fingers — and said, "Di. Thank you. For not making it crueler than it had to be."
I thought about Tina saying nearly the same thing would come later, on moving day, and about how both of them seemed to have been bracing for a version of me that would have enjoyed their ruin. "We're family," I said. "Crueler was never the point."
Inside, I stood in the dark hallway for a moment with my hand on the wall, and something in my chest had unclenched, just a fraction. Not forgiveness — not yet, maybe not ever, not fully. But the beginning of seeing my brother as a whole person again: the boy on the steps, the drowning man, the father trying to find his way back to his son. All of them true. All of them mine to reckon with.
He told me about the debts then — not the numbers, because the numbers didn't matter, but the shape of them: the credit cards he'd opened to cover the mortgage gap, the truck payment he'd fallen behind on twice, the way every month had become a math problem with no solution. "Tina didn't know the half of it," he said. "I kept telling her the next month would be better. And then Mom had the surgery, and she was so out of it, and the papers were right there, and I thought —" He stopped. "I thought if I just got us through the year, I'd fix it later. Put it back. Like borrowing."
"Like borrowing," I repeated. "Mark, you can't borrow someone's house."
"I know that now." He turned the bottle in his hands. "Do you remember when Dad caught me with his tools? I was fourteen. I'd taken his good socket set apart to 'fix' my bike, and there were pieces all over the garage floor, and he didn't yell. He just stood there and said, 'Mark, a man puts things back the way he found them.' I've thought about that every day for a month. I didn't put it back, Di. I don't know if I can."
"You signed the rescission," I said. "That's putting it back. The rest — the trust, all of it — that's slower. But it's not impossible. Josh still loves you. Tina's still here. Mom —" I paused. "Mom's going to need you to be her son again, not her landlord. Can you do that?"
He didn't answer right away. Then: "I'm going to try. I don't know if trying counts."
"It counts," I said. "It's the only thing that ever counted."
Chapter 26: Moving Day
The truck came on a Saturday morning, sixty days to the day after the mediation, and the street watched the way streets always watch — curtains twitching, Eleanor openly watering her front flowers at an hour when she never watered anything, two neighbors finding urgent reasons to walk their dogs past our house. Tina had hired the movers herself, two young men who worked fast and careful, and by ten o'clock the house had begun to echo in a way I hadn't heard since childhood, when we'd first moved in and before the furniture arrived.
Margaret walked through the rooms as they emptied, touching the doorframes, the windowsills, the wall where Mark's trophies had hung and left pale rectangles on the paint. In the kitchen she stopped at the back cupboard and opened it, and I knew she was looking at the spot where the biscuit tin had lived, and she closed the cupboard again with a small nod, like she'd confirmed something to herself.
"Strange," she said, "how a house sounds when it's deciding to be yours again."
Josh carried boxes without being asked, his jaw set, his eyes red. He'd been quiet all week — quieter than usual, which for Josh meant nearly silent — and I'd caught him twice standing in Margaret's garden just looking at it, like he was memorizing it. When the last of his boxes was on the truck, he went to his grandmother where she stood in the hallway, and he hugged her hard, the way teenage boys hug when they think no one is watching, all elbows and fierceness.
"I'll come Saturdays," he said into her shoulder. "To help with the garden. If that's okay."
"It's more than okay," Margaret said, holding his face in her hands the way she'd done when he was small. "You come whenever you want. This is your grandmother's house, and grandmothers' houses always have room."