Chapter 10: What the House Felt Like After
Jessica and Tyler were gone before two o'clock.
She had packed two bags.
She had moved through the house with the careful efficiency of someone who had done this before — which, Jasmine now understood, she had.
Tyler, sixteen and confused, had said nothing.
He'd carried his own bag to her car without making eye contact with anyone.
The front door closed.
Jasmine stood in the hallway.
Marcus was in the kitchen.
David had gone upstairs.
She waited.
After ten minutes, she went up and knocked on his bedroom door.
"Come in."
He was sitting on the edge of the bed.
Not lying down.
Not pacing.
Just sitting, the way a person sits when they're waiting for the next thing to present itself.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
He looked at her.
"I keep thinking about the day I met her," he said.
"Trying to find the moment I should have seen it."
Jasmine sat down beside him.
"You couldn't have," she said.
"She sat in this house," he said.
"She ate at that table.
She slept in this room." He paused.
"This was your mother's house."
"It still is," Jasmine said.
"It still is, Dad."
He turned to look at her.
For a moment he looked like the father she remembered from when she was very small — before loss, before time, before all the years that had rearranged his face.
Something in him was tired and something in him was relieved and both of those things were happening at once.
"Marcus told me you found the photograph," he said.
"Helen's daughter gave him a box of photos."
"Helen always kept everything." He almost smiled.
"Your mother used to tease her about it."
They sat quietly for a moment.
"The lawyer," Jasmine said.
"What happens now?"
"Robert's statement will be part of it," David said.
"The lawyer thinks there's grounds for annulment given the fraudulent misrepresentation — the fact that she knew Anne and lied about it directly." He exhaled slowly.
"It won't be fast.
But it'll be thorough."
"And the money she tried to access?"
"My accountant flagged three attempts over the past fourteen months.
We're working through it." He looked at his hands.
"She was careful.
But not careful enough."
Jasmine thought about what Robert had said on the phone.
*She gets there first.
She sets the frame.*
This time she hadn't gotten there first.
This time someone had been quicker.
Downstairs, Marcus called up that he'd made tea if either of them wanted it.
David stood.
He straightened his shirt and ran one hand across the back of his neck.
"Your uncle," he said.
"I should have listened to him sooner.
He never liked her."
"He was protecting himself too," Jasmine said honestly.
"He wasn't just protecting us."
"Still," David said.
"He came."
They went downstairs together.
Marcus had made tea and found a packet of biscuits in the back of the cupboard.
He'd set three mugs on the table in the good kitchen, the one that still had Jasmine's height marks penciled on the doorframe from when she was growing up, the one with the window that faced the garden.
David sat down and wrapped both hands around his mug.
Marcus sat across from him.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Then David said: "You should have just told me from the beginning."
"I know," Marcus said.
"I would have been angry at first."
"I know that too."
David nodded slowly.
"Tell me more about Gary Flint."
Marcus told him.
And Jasmine sat between the two men who had shown up for her — imperfectly, each in their own way, carrying their own complications — and drank her tea while the afternoon light moved slowly across the kitchen floor.
The house was quiet in the way a house gets quiet after something hard has passed through it.
Not empty.
Just still.
And for the first time in two years, it felt entirely like hers again.
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*Some people come into our lives with patience and a plan — and it's only the ones who truly love us that find the courage to speak up in time.
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