And then, to my own horror, I laughed.
Not because anything was funny. Because sometimes when pain gets too crowded, your body chooses the wrong exit.
A shadow fell across me. Mr. Blackwood lowered himself onto the step beside me with the careful stiffness of a man who billed by the hour and had never once in his life sat on church stairs for free.
“Your father,” he said, handing me a cream envelope with my name written in shaky blue ink, “would have been very proud of your timing.”
My chest tightened at the sight of his handwriting. “Did he really change everything last week?”
“The night he got the investigator’s report,” Blackwood said. “He made me drive over at two in the morning. I have not forgiven him for the timing, but I respect the style.”
I opened the envelope right there, with funeral guests and reporters and sunlight and my whole ruined marriage humming around me.
My darling Natalie, the letter began. If Blackwood has just detonated the bomb I left in my will, then your husband is learning what it means to stand on his own legs without leaning on mine.
I swallowed hard and kept reading.