PART 7
I told my children everything two weeks later, sitting them down at my own kitchen table the way Silas and I used to do whenever something serious needed saying out loud.
My eldest, Thomas, was the first one to find words.
“Dad let us all believe he’d cut Mom out of the will,” he said, something between anger and disbelief in his voice. “For weeks. He let us sit there feeling sorry for her, feeling confused about him, and the entire time—”
“The entire time, he was protecting me from a debt Roland created decades before any of you were even born,” I said. “I understand why some of you are upset about the performance of it. I was upset too, sitting in that room. But I’ve had two weeks now to sit with the reasoning behind it, and I believe your father made the choice that protected the most people, with the least actual risk, given what he was up against.”
“Does Aunt Harriet know?” my daughter, Louise, asked. “About Roland’s part in this?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I think that conversation is overdue, though I’m not entirely sure how to have it without breaking something in that family I’d genuinely rather not break.”
