My husband had spent years warning me never to set foot on that farm. So after he passed away and the lawyer handed me the key, saying that from now on the place belonged to me, I was ready to sell it right away and put everything behind me. But before making my final decision, I still wanted to see it once for myself. When the door opened, I finally understood why, all those years, he had never wanted me to set foot there.

It is difficult to describe the exact quality of anger that rose in me then because anger was too small a word for it. It was not rage in the loud sense. It was something colder. Deeper. The fury of moral trespass. They had tried to defraud us, divide us, manipulate my daughter’s grief, and now they sat in my living room asking for her body as if biology itself were a debt she might owe.

“You lied to her,” I said. “You tried to use her. And now you’re here asking whether she might undergo surgery to save your life.”

Robert closed his eyes briefly, as if conceding the ugliness of how it sounded without conceding the entitlement beneath it.

“We are still family, Catherine.”

I reached into my pocket and took out Joshua’s envelope.

“Funny you should say that.”

Robert’s gaze fixed on it immediately.

“He left this for you. With instructions to use it only if absolutely necessary.” I looked from one brother to the next. “I think we’ve arrived there.”

His hand shook slightly when I gave it to him.

He opened the letter. Read the first lines. Then stopped breathing for a second in that visible way people do when reality catches them behind the knees.

Allan leaned in. “What is it?”

Robert kept reading.