“But what difference does it make what I look like?” the beautiful swan, who had just moments before been an ugly duckling, asked.
“It’s not that it matters, exactly—” the ducks stuttered, looking awkwardly down at the ground.
“No, it doesn’t. Society’s beauty standards have messed you up. What makes one duckling any prettier than any other duckling, anyway?” The swan paused, looking each and every one of her siblings in the eye. “I’ll tell you what. It’s nothing to do with who any of us are on the inside. It’s all about who the humans want to eat.”
—FAIRY TALES FOR LITTLE FEMINISTS:
THE INTELLIGENT DUCKLING, EVELYN HARPER KREIS
January 1996
Saskia was thirteen.
“‘Born one month after the death of infamous virtuoso Glenn Gould,’” Mike read from the program, then looked up in disgust. Evie refused to catch his eye, and he resorted to staring at her in the lighted mirrors of the guest artist’s dressing room. “Evie. It’s ridiculous.”
Evie tugged a little too sharply on the brush, and Saskia pulled away with a snarl.
“She’s already a prodigy. Isn’t that enough? You don’t have to make her into the reincarnation of a dead genius—”
“Oh, Mike,” Evie said, twisting around to open the dry-cleaning bag. “You know how these things are. They asked for a biography, but what they really want is a story—and, besides, what else is there to say? She’s thirteen!” She pulled out a full-skirted white dress.
Saskia made a face. “Is that what I’m wearing?”
I am not putting a child in a ball gown, Evie had declared to Mike and Carrie at dinner when they’d planned it all. It would be very silly to put a child in a ball gown. Saskia reached out a hand to the gauzy fabric, at the blue ribbon running around the low waist. It would fall to just below her knees, the sash sticking out behind her in a bow.
“Mom, I’m going to look like a ghost!” Saskia cried.
“Well, you love ghosts,” Evie said absently, jimmying the fabric off of the hanger.
“Mom!”
“Saskia, you were the one who wouldn’t go to the store with me to try the dresses on. You were the one who insisted that I should just order it for you.”
They stared at each other, Saskia’s dark eyes on Evie’s pale ones, turning hard like sea glass now that she was mad.
And Evie threw up her hands. “I know, I can’t do anything right. I’m the bad guy, I’m the villain here. But if I didn’t buy the dress, Saskia, you would not have a dress. And”—whirling around to Mike—“if I didn’t write the program notes, Mike, there would be no program notes.” Saskia looked down as her mother’s heels ticked away, but she couldn’t miss the slam, how the door seemed to vibrate on its hinges for seconds afterward.
And then her father’s hands clamped down on her shoulders, warm and solid and calloused where he held the cello, held his bow. It was wonderful having him here. He lived in a separate world from Saskia, she thought sometimes. His evening performances, his weekend matinees; their lives touched only at very specific points, her concerts among them.
You waltz in and out of her life, and I’m sorry, Mike, but we can’t both be the fun parent, she’d heard her mother spit a few weeks ago, when she hadn’t realized Sas could hear her.
And her father: Yeah, but honey, I’m just so fun—
And her mother’s giggles, and Saskia had turned up the volume on her Mozart.
“Look, Sas,” Mike said, leaning back against the counter. “It doesn’t matter what you wear. You know how they’re always making us dress up in our tuxedos for our concerts. You think I like being strangled half to death by my own bow tie?”
Despite herself, she smiled.
“The only important thing is that you have fun, yeah?” he said.
Saskia raised her pale eyebrows.
“What’s the most fun piece you’re playing tonight?” he asked.
“The Mazurka. Fifty-six, one,” she said, her eyes widening. “I have to fake the elevenths,” splitting into a grin, then hesitating. Did they have the same kind of thing in cello? She wasn’t sure. “For the really big reaches, when I have to hit two notes really far apart at the same time. I have to use two hands for most of them, but Carrie says nobody will be able to tell.”
Mike nodded, face grave. “Then think about that,” he said. “Think about the fake elevenths. How you’ll be the only one who knows they’re not real. Well. You, me, and Carrie. Those elevenths—those elevenths are what matter. The dress? The dress is just a costume.”
“Yeah,” Saskia said. “Yeah, okay.”
Minutes later, dress on, she slipped her hand into her father’s and they walked to the stage, Evie just a few paces behind. The three of them stood poised behind the curtains, poised as the announcement came on, poised as the applause rippled over, around, through them, and then—
“Have fun, kiddo,” Mike whispered. “Remember the elevenths.”
And Saskia dropped his hand and walked out onto the stage alone.
There was nothing like the pride of performing. She’d never been able to put it into words, she wasn’t sure even her father understood: the full warmth she got in her chest as the audience’s eyes widened, as they sat back in delight to watch her play. Look what is possible. Look what this child can do. Look what I can do.
If you didn’t know anything about piano, you’d think only the fingers were important, but it wasn’t true. She moved, swayed, twisted from her back, her shoulders, her hips, her elbows. It was part of her performance, part of how she experienced the music.
Offstage, Carrie had her doing a series of push-ups and sit-ups every day to strengthen those muscles, in addition to the Hanon exercises for her hands. Onstage, the dance of her fingers across the slick ivory keys, the heat and shine of the spotlight, the invisible spectators seeing every movement, hearing every note—
It was like nothing else in the world.
It was like flying.
And then the applause. It sounded like rain pounding down when she was especially good. Building and building, soaking her, pounding down around her.
And its final, inevitable, break.
January 2020
The university’s winter ivy has gone thread-bare against the red brick. How often has Saskia sat in this same parking lot, in this same car? A hundred times, at least. It is half a mile from the bank, another half mile to the house, distances she’d never consider driving in New York, if driving were even an option for her there. Yet here she is, pulling into the parking space that is still her mother’s, even though Evelyn Kreis will never park here again.
It would have been too cold to walk: the cold has clasped on to the city like one of those slap bracelets from when she was little, tightly banded, refusing to let go. Two degrees, but with a windchill that’s much lower. Something about the cold feels different here than it does in New York, where you’re never too far from a coffee shop or a subway station or a bodega, blasting heat as soon as you walk through the door.
At least she doesn’t have to go to the arts building. She has a thousand memories in the arts building. The leafy patterns the trees left on her mother’s wall. The posters pinned up haphazardly in Patrick’s office. Her legs wrapped around him in the red light of the darkroom. But today’s all about administration. And the administration building—she can’t remember ever being here before, down these black-and-white marble halls.
And then, there: Patrick Kintner, Vice President of Development.
Saskia pauses, reaching with vertiginous guilt into her pocket for her phone. She turns on a Voice Memo, hesitating only a moment before sliding it back into her pocket. She doesn’t owe him anything at all, anymore. She doesn’t, she tells herself fiercely.
The door is open, and Saskia is momentarily surprised at how well the outer office would have met her mother’s exacting standards: plush Oriental rugs, wood-paneled walls, maps of the campus from a century ago in gilt frames.
“Can I help you?” the twentysomething receptionist chirps from behind the desk. “Work-study? Something—else?”
None of her business, Saskia reminds herself. Not anymore.
“Yes, hi. I’m—”
The inner door opens.
“Saskia Kreis,” says Patrick.
Her name has always sounded like a knife when he says it. For at least seventeen years after they broke up, he still attended Kreis family functions. He and Evie were coffees-on-campus buddies, and the end of a relationship with her daughter—the end of a secret relationship with her daughter, one that Evie had never known about—was not going to stop that. And so for seventeen years, Sas had waved too cheerfully at Christmas parties, had let herself linger afterward in the faint glow of longing. Their interactions had always been polite, even pleasant (at least, from the outside). Always brief.
Patrick. The one who got away.
(Technically, she was the one who got away. But he’d been the one to make her go.)
Now, it’s been two years since she’s seen him. Not so much in the scheme of their history. Not so little, either. His hazel eyes, so warm they seem almost golden in some lights, have a few more crinkles around the edges. He turned sixty in August, and his mane is full silver now; it suits him.
He approaches her, setting a hand on her forearm, kissing her cheek. And whatever anger she’s directed at herself for loving him, for the intensity of it, the feverishness of it, dissipates as she looks into his eyes. As she feels his body brush against hers: ah, yes. She remembers. And she forgives herself.
He tugs slightly at her forearm. “Come in, come in.”
Something strange about his skin on hers, and it takes her until she’s collapsed into the faded leather armchair in front of his mahogany desk to identify it.
“No calluses,” she says, nodding at his hands. “Haven’t you been out on the water?”
Perched on the corner of his desk, he flips his large hands over to study the palms. Looks up with a grin, a wink. “It’s January, Sas. Nobody in their right mind sails in January in Wisconsin.”
She has to laugh at that. At herself.
“But in the summer, you can’t get me on dry land. The new boat, The Ingenue Two—she’s got a motor. Makes the going way easier. Not like the last one. You remember?”
“Oh, my God!” she cries. “I’d totally forgotten.”
“An hour, hour and a half out into the lake and the wind just dies—”
“And there we were. Just floating.”
Silence. Both of them remembering what they did with that time, alone on the lake. Before the wind rose again.
“And look at you now,” she says.
He stands, holding his hands out at his sides. “Look at me! Some ending for a bohemian, hey? Shove me in a suit, corral me till five P.M.”
He had never seemed like an institution kind of guy. But his charm, his ease with the wealthy … he was always completely in his element at the Christmas parties. On some fundamental level, this new role fits him down to his bones.
“How are you liking it?” she asks.
“Oh…” He stretches his legs, turns to look out one of the two huge windows arching behind his desk. That gravitas. He’s like an actor playing a dead president. “I’m not sure it’s a question of liking it. It was time for me to grow up. Set something aside for the future.”
It’s as good a segue as she’ll get. She takes a deep breath, tries to fight the blush rising on her cheeks as she considers what she’s about to say.
“Look, I don’t mean to make this weird. But has Josh Asher been in touch with you about my mother’s—”
Before she’s even finished her sentence, he’s holding up a packet of papers from the glossy surface of his desk. Papers that look a whole lot like her mother’s will.
She nods. “My dad and I—” But she can’t finish her thought. He’s coming closer to her, sitting on the arm of the leather chair next to her, and his proximity, the dark stubble, the smell of pine and clay; it’s overwhelming.
When he speaks, his voice is low, gentle. “It must have come as quite a surprise to you.”
She shifts in her chair, trying to maintain some distance. “Yeah, it did. We can’t help— Well, the thing is, Patrick, we couldn’t help wondering—”
His head drifts, ever so slightly to the side. “If it was a mistake? If she meant to do it?”
She breathes deep, from her sternum. “Yeah.”
“No.”
“No, it was a mistake?”
“No, it wasn’t a mistake.”
She squints her eyes shut. “Start over.”
He laughs, gently. Seats himself properly in the chair, angled toward her.
“Your mother and I had both been thinking a lot about legacies. About what we’d leave behind when we’re gone.” She tries to breathe around the tightening of her throat, tries to keep listening. “And over the past year or so, we began work on a project that means a lot to both of us. An arts center for the pre-college kids.”
She’s fighting it, but the guilt is inescapable. How bad a daughter she’d been, how bad a person. Her mother had never even broached the subject with her. She hadn’t even heard her mother’s voice in three … four months, she corrects herself. She’d tried to call at Thanksgiving, had ended up with an apologetic email from her parents about how they’d been with Georgia. She’d tried again at Christmas, and her mother had texted a reply hours later: they had been watching It’s a Wonderful Life; it’s too late now, catch up next week? But next week had come and gone, and finally, two weeks later, Saskia had been about to call home herself when her father’s name lit up her cell phone and everything she knew about her life changed.
But she can’t think about that now. She needs to stay focused.
“Why the pre-college programs?”
“Well, we haven’t had an art and design pre-college course since 2012, did you know that?” She shakes her head. “The costs were just getting too high. We tried to make up for it about a decade ago by raising the price. Twelve hundred dollars for a six-week program. But then the Journal Sentinel came after us, and it was the final nail in the coffin. Well. They went after all the pre-college programs, really, but they singled us out—art and design—for the cost.”
She frowns. “I mean, it costs what it costs, right?”
“Saskia—” And he laughs. “Ever the innocent. Think about it, who can afford a twelve-hundred-dollar summer program in the arts for their kids, particularly in Milwaukee? White parents. You know that we’re consistently named one of the most segregated cities in America? All of that redlining. Anyway, the journalist did his research and found that while the school accepts around seventy-five percent of undergraduate applicants, that number jumped up to ninety-five percent for those who’d attended one of our pre-college programs. Basically, only the rich kids could afford our summer programs, and then the rich kids got rewarded with almost guaranteed college acceptance. We couldn’t keep the program going after that. We couldn’t afford to reinforce the idea that our admissions are rigged.”
Evie had never said a word. Saskia thinks about the calls she used to have with her mother. Dumping out the mundane details of her own life, the dinner she’d cooked, the run she’d gone on, all the while avoiding anything actually meaningful: the men, her work, her boxing. For the first time, she realizes that Evie must have been doing the same thing.
She never knew any of this.
“Okay,” she says, twisting her hands together. “Fine. But if Mom really wanted to help underprivileged kids, couldn’t she just have made a donation? Started the Evelyn Kreis scholarship program or something?”
His face is kind, though there’s a hint of incredulity sneaking in. “Saskia. Of course, she’d have loved to endow a scholarship in her name. But … with what money?” he says, his lightly admonishing tone reigniting the burning sensation in her chest.
Of course. She closes her eyes for a second, trying to will the blood out of her face again. But she fails this time, feels it pulsing through her cheeks as Patrick goes on. “Look. The thing about these programs, unlike English or econ, is that they actually require studio space and materials, in addition to classrooms. Finite resources. And our undergrads and faculty need to access those over the summer, as well. When I was head of the department, art and design flourished under my leadership. We attracted more students, more great teachers. But the facilities didn’t grow accordingly. We’re working with the same space as we were twenty years ago.”
“So … the Elf House,” Saskia says dully as the puzzle pieces slide into place.
He nods. “The Elf House.”
“But…” She takes a deep breath; somehow, she already feels defeated. “Why wouldn’t she have first tried selling it to the university?”
“Sas, look. It’s a beautiful house. It’s a historic house. But to spend three million dollars on it, only to invest more funds to actually convert it to the kind of facility your mother and I wanted? It was always a tricky proposition. And, given my insight into the development arm of the university, I increasingly felt that there was a high risk that if the sale went through—and that was still a big if—the university would use it for a new president’s house. You’ve seen the current place?”
She shrugs; she knows she’s been there for some university function or another, but not in decades. And she probably hadn’t been paying that much attention in the first place.
“We don’t refuse gifts,” he says firmly. “We take everything that comes our way. But if she tried to sell the house to us, she faced the possibility that one, we wouldn’t buy it and two, she would essentially forfeit the right to have any say in how it was used. As a gift, and as a gift channeled through me, she could be much more involved. And beyond that…” A pause as his fingers brush over the polished surface of the desk, wiping away an imaginary smudge. “Your mother … she was a very sick woman at the end, Sas. And I think she just wanted to spend her last days doing things she loved, rather than being buried in paperwork.”
So there it was: even Patrick had known her mother was ill. Of course, Evie would have wanted to spend her time with her hands in the dirt, pulling up weeds. To sit on the sofa with her eyes closed, La Traviata on the ancient record player. To hole up in the cottage, finishing her book.
How many conversations with her mother had Patrick had, to work all of this out? More than one. Probably half a dozen or more. All of that time, Saskia had been prancing through New York, oblivious; all of that time, her mother had been here. With him. Telling him what to do once she died.
Saskia watches his open face, his patient eyes. She nods.
But he’s waiting for more from her, face open in bright anticipation. She gathers her thoughts.
“I just wish I’d known,” she says.
“I think,” he says carefully, like a harpsichordist picking out the delicate notes, “I think that she worried it would upset you. I know she tried to bring up some of the details with your father, and the reaction wasn’t … what she’d hoped for.”
Saskia can’t imagine what that would look like. As long as she’s been alive, Mike has acquiesced to Evie’s wishes. Been the mild-mannered squire in the background.
It’s hovering between them, ready to be plucked out of the air. And she has to ask; she can’t stop herself. She doesn’t really want to know; she has to know.
“Patrick,” she says, and her voice has gone hoarse, “did my mother know about us?”
But he meets her question with his steady, lighthouse gaze.
“No,” he says, and his tone is final. “Never.” The word resonates through the room.
Her hands have gone shaky. But Saskia can’t avoid it: Evie had known she was dying. She had known, and she had orchestrated this. With Patrick, who knows what she’d wanted. Knows it far better than Saskia herself ever could. Suddenly, her fight for the Elf House no longer seems like such a noble quest. It makes her feel like a tabloid cliché. The overlooked former heiress, fighting against a worthy cause to get her grubby hands on a dead parent’s money.
And yet—that’s not entirely who she is. It’s all so complicated. It’s all just ever so slightly … off. Something doesn’t make sense, but she can’t identify it, other than the diffuse, floating cloud of wrongness surrounding them. She follows his eyes down to her knee, where her fingers are tapping something out. It takes her a minute to put a name to the notes. Requiem. Of course. Her subconscious is so freaking predictable.
And Patrick. His words, his body, his scent, and his mind; she’s too ready to believe the best in him. She forces herself into the adversarial position again. Makes herself say it.
Her stomach twisting, she unfolds her legs. Feet on the floor, down to earth. “All talk of legacies aside, there’s still the matter of my dad. He was planning to retire in a year or two. And I just can’t imagine that they didn’t discuss this, that he wouldn’t hear her out, before she’d make that significant of a decision. I don’t suppose there’s any way…” Saskia had thought about it in the car on the way over, what she had to offer. It wasn’t much. “Maybe the programs could use the outbuildings, or a wing of the house, for a period of time? While my father continued to live there? And we could maybe talk about donating it in a few years. If we could just stay there for the duration of my father’s lifetime…”
But Patrick’s face is almost mournful, and she can’t stand the sound of her own voice begging. He takes her hand in his: the bruises and cuts of a boxer against the smooth perfection of a sailor’s palms in winter.
“Sas, you know I’d do almost anything for you.” She tries to keep his gaze while still breathing fully, but both aren’t possible, and her breath comes out short, choked. “But I owe this to Evie. To the community, to the students, but most of all to her. Especially now that she’s gone. It’s what she wanted, Sas. It is.”
Her mother could have told Saskia at any time. Saskia would have dealt with it. Would have come home, come back to her. But she chose not to.
And then, as Saskia swims alone in the abyss of her contrition—how does he manage it?—the conversation shifts back to pleasantries, to nothingness, to cheek kisses and goodbyes and promises of coffee. Her legs feel light and trembly, full of helium, as she makes her way back down the halls and out the front door, and it’s only when she’s sitting in her car again that she thinks: Wait a minute.
The taxes. The lien. The not insignificant details she’d forgotten to mention.
Her mother was keenly aware of the back taxes due on the house when she changed the will in July. They didn’t make any sense as part of a gift, only as part of a sale. Who’d want a gift that would cost you more than a hundred grand upon receipt? What institution would want to take on that burden?
Beyond that, Patrick himself doesn’t make sense to her. She can see him more clearly, now that he’s not right in front of her. Because what is he really doing in that formal office, in that obsequious role? His growing up, his settling down. No matter how good he is at making people give up more than they’d bargained for—something about him still doesn’t add up.
Why the hell is he there?
Back at the house, she can’t sit still with the silence in her head. Saskia plans her weekend: a five-mile run and thirty minutes with the jump rope. She’s been letting her conditioning fade; she’s letting her body go; she can’t spar while she’s home, but she could, should, keep up her fitness levels.
The idea of finding a temporary boxing gym for next week, for the next few weeks—hell, the idea of being a woman in a Midwestern club—makes her shudder. And a run sounds good, it sounds clarifying. She’s dying to go past the lighthouse, for one thing. The North Point Lighthouse, still functioning after a century or more, keeping the ships from thrusting themselves against the rough shore. A loop through the park, down by the beach, winding back up St. Mary’s Hill, past the water tower; that should give her a good five miles. A tour through the monuments of her life.
It’s a reflex, reaching into the mailbox and bringing in the day’s letters. The envelope on top is from the county treasurer’s office. Labeled FINAL NOTICE OPEN IMMEDIATELY in block red letters. The regret washes over her again. She can’t believe she didn’t mention it to Patrick: the $120,000 that he, or the school, would need to pay. Does he know?
And the lien—she’d been so caught up in memories of her mother, on imagining the conversations that had been taking place without her, that she’d forgotten. In retrospect, even thirty minutes later, their conversation has already blurred into a haze in her mind. She is no longer sure exactly what Patrick said. Only that he’d left her faintly nostalgic and comforted, saddened and resigned—with just the slightest tinge of suspicion.
But Saskia Kreis’s middle name might as well be slightest tinge of suspicion, and she’s learned she can’t trust that feeling. She tears open the notice—30 days before legal proceedings—and her heart’s going off like hoofbeats at a racetrack. Thirty days and the government takes the house? It’s too undignified to even consider. How the hell would they ever get it back then?
“Where’s Dad?” she asks Wolfie as she goes into the house. It’s the system of finding each other that the Kreises have used for decades, far more reliable than the ancient intercoms. And Wolfie, preemptively proud of himself, wags his tail all the way to the study, where she pats him on the head, praises him.
Mike is sitting behind his behemoth of a desk, sorting through piles of papers like some Dickensian villain. He looks up quickly, then looks up again to smile at his daughter.
“Hey, kiddo. What’ve you been up to?”
She crosses the room, Wolfie peeling off halfway to jump into a brocade armchair, and hands him the final notice without saying a word. He looks at it for a second before tossing it onto a pile of papers a foot high.
She waits for him to say something. To say, Oh, we took care of this. To say, Ach, this stupid mistake, it’s cost me so much time. But there’s just silence, and she lets her eyes wander around the room. Beneath the black wrought-iron radiator, a spider’s spun silver webs, thick as cloth. She winces.
“When’s the last time the cleaning team came in?” she asks.
Mike’s face, loosening into despair, tells her immediately that it was the wrong question.
“Kid. Do you have any idea how much it costs to clean a place like this?”
Saskia grimaces. “My friend Gina cleans. She makes fifteen an hour—”
“We paid seven fifty a week. Up until last year.”
“Oh.” Her voice small.
“You have seven hundred and fifty dollars a week to spare?” But his tone isn’t mean, just teasing. “Does the SAT pay you that much?”
She rolls her eyes. “Fifteen bucks a question,” she says. “But I’ll keep it, thanks very much. Maybe I’ll just get the vacuum out every now and again.”
He laughs, the suddenness of it startling her.
“What?”
“I’ll give you fifteen bucks right now if you can tell me where the vacuum is.”
A beat. She makes a face.
“Well, it’s a big house,” she says, and his laughter is warm, almost distracting her from the matter at hand. “Dad, seriously, though. We’ve got thirty days to pay the overdue property taxes. And then they’ll start legal proceedings against us—”
“Honey,” he says, “I’ve got it under control.”
She throws up her hands. “But you obviously don’t! Thirty days, Dad! Less than a month!”
He looks up at the ceiling, then slowly lowers his eyes to hers.
“We got some advice from Paul last year. The county almost never forecloses on non-mortgage liens, kid. And your mother was working out a payment plan—I know she made a big payment sometime last year—so, yes, I’ll take care of it. Really.”
She can tell by the firmness in his tone that she’s supposed to drop it. But there’s too much, it’s too knotted a web, for just one person to work out alone.
“Listen, Dad. I’ve been going through Mom’s papers, trying to organize some stuff for Tara. They’re a fucking mess. The lien, the foundation, the cliffs … I mean, yeah, she got a chunk of money for her new book last year, but the book—it’s not even done. So, I dropped by the bank today, and Jeffrey says we could get a mortgage on the house, cover some of the expenses that way—”
“Saskia,” he says, and his voice is exhausted, if gentle. “Sas, you really need to disabuse yourself of this kind of magical thinking. Your mother would not want you to saddle yourself with decades of debt just to keep this place going. Even if we get to keep the house for now, we won’t get to keep the house. We’ll just be keeping it to sell it.”
She’s screwed up her face, tight against his words. He smiles at her expression.
“I know. But it’s not such a bad thing, three million dollars.”
“But Dad … the Elf House—” And her face flushes as her voice breaks. When was the last time she cried in front of him? Not since she was a child.
“Sweetie. What are you realistically going to do with a place like this? What would any single person ever need all of this space for? You’re telling me, in all honesty—all magical thinking aside—you wouldn’t rather have half the estate? You wouldn’t rather take the one-and-a-half-million? And in time, a bit more?”
And for a second, she lets herself imagine it.
She imagines letting the Elf House go.
A million and a half dollars, and a hundred grand a year—for at least the next few years, she figures—on the royalties. She could pick up and move anywhere, anywhere in the world. She could buy her own place. She could get a dog, her own dog. Buy daily private sessions with world-class coaches; take her boxing to the next level. Visit her favorite cities, Vienna and Moscow, see more of the world, but fresh this time, unfiltered—
She shakes herself out of her fractured thoughts with the memory of Patrick’s face.
“It’s all moot,” she says, her voice rough. “I mean, yes, of course. I see the appeal. But it’s all moot unless we can actually get the house. And, Dad, I’m not sure that we can. I went to see Patrick today.”
He leans back at that, crossing his muscular cellist’s arms in front of his chest.
“It was all very pleasant. But he says that, apparently, he and Mom had been discussing turning the house into an arts center. And he seems to think that she left the house to him, rather than to the university, just to make things—easier? I guess at the beginning, she thought about selling it, but then once she got sick, she wanted to make sure it was used for what she wanted it used for? And so she decided to donate it outright.”
His eyes narrow as his jaw tenses.
“Her plan—our plan—was to sell it to the university. Always.”
Saskia shakes her head. “Not according to Patrick. Not by the end. Or … the beginning of the end, I guess. Not by last July. He also said…” And she pauses, not sure if she should broach it. She doesn’t want to shame her father, but she has to get it all out there, if they’re going to get to the bottom of this. “He also says that she tried to talk to you about this new plan, and you didn’t … react well.”
And then she waits.
Finally, her father exhales and swivels away. “I don’t think that’s right. But to be honest, I wasn’t … I wasn’t always the person I wanted to be. Those last few months.” He makes a disgusted sound from the back of his throat. “She was always trying to bring up the will, but I shut her down. I thought it was important to keep a positive mindset, at first. And then … I guess I just wanted her to enjoy the time she had left, not to have to think about that stuff.” His eyes flicker to the side. “My memory’s been … well. Everything has felt very slippery these last few months. I have to read back through my journals, see what I can piece together. I should probably go talk to him myself, just to make sure.”
“Dad—” she says. But then triumph breaks like a wave, washing over her panic as she remembers. “Actually, you don’t have to. I recorded it. Here, I’ll just AirDrop it to your phone—”
But she pauses just before hitting send. What exactly had they reminisced about? What would their conversation give away? She pretends it’s sent, sliding her phone back into her pocket. He has too much paperwork to deal with, he’ll forget. And in the meantime, she’ll listen to it again, edit out anything incriminating.
Anything incriminating for her.
Still, as she leaves the room, she feels the sword dangling over her head, suspended by a filament as fine as one of her mother’s hairs.
Thirty days.