“Mom, please.” Melissa’s voice cracked. “I know we made a terrible mistake, but—”
“Stop.” I held up my hand. “This isn’t a negotiation. Sign, or I walk across the street to the DA’s office and file charges. Thomas Winters is waiting for my call.”
At the mention of the assistant district attorney, Brandon’s already pale face went ashen. He knew Thomas from high school—another local boy he’d looked down on, who had now surpassed him.
“You’d really do that?” he asked. “Send your own children to jail?”
“The woman who would have forgiven you anything died on County Road 27,” I replied evenly. “You left her in the dust.”
Brandon looked away first, then reached for the pen Vincent offered. His signature was shaky but legible. Melissa took longer, tears dropping onto the paper as she signed her name.
“What happens now?” she asked in a small voice.
“Now you leave Milfield,” I said, gathering the signed documents. “Both of you. Today. If I see either of you in this town again, I will press charges regardless of what you’ve signed.”
“And the developer?” Brandon asked—a last attempt at salvaging something.
Robert smiled thinly.
“Platinum Acres will be formally notified that the property is not, and was never, for sale,” he said. “They’ll also be receiving notification of our intent to file suit for their part in what appears to be a conspiracy to defraud a widow.”
They left without another word, shoulders slumped in defeat. I watched through Vincent’s window as they walked separately to their cars—Brandon to his rental, Melissa to her flashy red convertible that Nicholas had helped her buy last year. Neither looked back at the office. Neither looked at each other.
“It’s done,” Vincent said quietly, placing the documents in his safe.
But it wasn’t done. Not yet.
“I need a ride,” I told Robert.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Home.”
The Canton farmhouse looked exactly as I’d left it four days earlier. White clapboard siding glowing in the late afternoon sun. Nicholas’s rocking chair still on the front porch, where he’d spent his last mobile days watching the orchard bloom. Only Brandon’s rental car in the driveway marked any change.
“Want me to come in with you?” Robert asked as he pulled up behind it.
“No. This part I do alone.”
Inside, the house was eerily quiet. I moved through the first floor, noting small disturbances—Brandon’s laptop on the dining table, a half-empty whiskey glass beside it, muddy shoes by the door he would never have left there when he lived here.
“Brandon?” I called out, my voice echoing through the rooms that had witnessed forty years of my life.
No answer.
I climbed the stairs, my hand trailing along the banister Nicholas had carved by hand our first year in the house. At the top, I noticed our bedroom door ajar, light spilling into the hallway. I pushed it open.
Brandon stood by the window, staring out at the orchard, his back to me. The room had been ransacked: dresser drawers pulled out, closet doors open, Nicholas’s possessions scattered across the bed we’d shared for four decades.
“Looking for something?” I asked coldly.
He didn’t startle. Didn’t turn around.
