Page 175 of Key West Homecoming

Emma didn’t need time to think about it.

“Don’t file anything. Give him the china and the jewelry. Give him the eleven hundred dollars.”

Rachel looked up. “I want to be sure you’re making that decision because it’s what you want, not because you’re tired of all of this.”

“It isn’t forgiveness. I’m not going to see him or write to him. If the state attorney charges him, I’m not asking anyone to go easy on him.”

Emma rested her hands in her lap.

“But Grandma sat down and decided who should have her mother’s china. She knew Arthur when she wrote that will. She knew his faults better than anyone, and she put his name there anyway.” Emma looked at Rachel. “Those things were hers to give. I’m not going to change her last decision because I’m angry with him.”

“You’re still angry?”

“Of course I am.”

Rachel smiled faintly. “Good. I was starting to worry Key West had turned you into a saint.”

“Not even close.”

Rachel wrote a note on the inventory.

“Then that’s what the estate will do.”

Yolanda appeared in the doorway carrying a stack of folders. She had apparently heard enough of the conversation to understand.

“Good,” she said.

She put the folders down and left again.

Emma laughed.

“I’m going to miss her.”

“You’re not allowed to take her.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“You were thinking about it.”

“I was.”

Chicago was seventy-one degrees and gray.

Emma stepped into her apartment Thursday afternoon with her bag still over one shoulder. The place smelled faintly stale, as though no one had cooked or opened a window in a month.

Nothing had changed.

That was the strangest part.

The books were still on the shelves. A stack of mail waited on the kitchen counter, and the blue bowl beside the door held two sets of keys and a handful of coins. Eleven hundred square feet of a life she had assembled over twelve years sat exactly where she had left it.

Emma waited for grief.

What came instead was recognition.

The apartment felt like a hotel room she had stayed in much too long.

She slept there Thursday night because she had nowhere else to sleep. Friday morning, she put on the gray blazer and took the Brown Line downtown at a quarter to nine.