I could pay him off. I had money — not Singapore-banker money, but enough. I could offer him a sum to sign a rescission and be done. But paying him would say the house was his to sell back to me. It would say that what he did was a transaction and not a wrong. And it would teach him, and me, that everything in this family has a price. My father, who had worked two jobs for twenty years and never taken a shortcut in his life, would have been ashamed of that solution. I would have been ashamed of it too, eventually, when the relief wore off.
I could leave. I could go back to Singapore, send more money, call every Sunday, and tell myself I had done what I could. The thought shamed me so deeply I had to put my head in my hands. Leaving was what I had done for six years. Leaving was how we got here.
Or I could do it properly. A lawyer. A formal demand. The paper trail, Eleanor's statement, my mother's own words. No shouting, no payoff, no retreat. The slow, boring, lawful machinery of making a wrong thing right — for my mother's sake, and not for my pride.
Margaret came into the kitchen in her robe, moving carefully on her hip. She stopped when she saw the papers spread on the table. For a moment I thought she would be angry, or frightened. Instead she came and sat beside me, and she looked at each document in turn, and then she put her hand over mine.
"You're going to fight him," she said. It was not a question.
"I'm going to get a lawyer," I said. "And I'm going to do this properly. No shouting. No deals in the dark. Just the truth, on paper, in the right order."
She was quiet for a while. Then she nodded, once, the way she used to nod when I told her I had decided something as a girl and she knew there was no talking me out of it.
"Your father would have liked that," she said softly. "The proper way. He always said —" Her voice caught. "He always said a thing done right is done once."
She stood, went to the stove, and started the coffee. Just like that. As if we had agreed on the weather. The old percolator gurgled, the smell filled the kitchen, and I watched my mother's back — the thin shoulders, the careful way she favored her right side — and I felt the strangest mixture of grief and admiration. This woman had kept a biscuit tin of evidence for eighteen months without telling a soul. She had been afraid, and medicated, and diminished in her own home, and she had still done the one thing that would save her: she had kept the receipts.
I gathered the papers, put them back in the biscuit tin in their neat stacks, and slid the tin back behind the flour. Then I took out my phone and searched for legal aid in Cedar Bluff, Tennessee, and I wrote down a name — Ellen Cho, attorney — and a phone number, and an address three blocks from the courthouse. My thumb hovered over the call button. It was not yet six in the morning. I would call at nine, when the office opened. I set an alarm, and then I sat with my mother at the kitchen table, drinking coffee in the blue dawn light, and we did not talk about the papers or the lawyer or Mark. We talked about her garden, and about the lemon cake, and about whether the maple in the front yard would turn all the way red this year. Ordinary things. The kind of things you talk about when you have just agreed, without quite saying it, to go to war together.
Mark's alarm went off upstairs. The house began to wake. I sat at the kitchen table with my coffee, and I felt, for the first time since the plane touched down, something steadier than guilt.
Resolve, I thought. That was the word. Not anger, not yet — anger would come, and I would have to manage it. But resolve: the clean, cold decision to see this through, whatever it cost, however long it took, because the woman humming at the stove had signed something she did not understand, and nobody was going to make that all right except me.
I was done being absent. It was time to be present, and to do the thing properly, once.
Outside, the sky was lightening over Cedar Bluff, pale gold at the edges of the maples. Somewhere upstairs, my brother slept in the house I had bought, untroubled as far as I knew, and I felt no pity for him then — that would come later, in its own complicated time. What I felt was the peculiar calm of a project manager at the start of a difficult project: the scope defined, the stakeholders identified, the first milestone set. Nine o'clock. A phone call. A lawyer's office three blocks from the courthouse. And behind the flour in my mother's kitchen, a biscuit tin full of the truth, waiting.