“I think he assumed that if he explained it, you would have to carry the danger too. And I think he was wrong in ways he understands now only if heaven allows a man to see his own errors.”
I looked down at my tea.
“That’s a very lawyerly way of apologizing on behalf of a dead man.”
A sad smile crossed his face.
“It is.”
He told me something else then that I had suspected but never confirmed. George had intended to tell me eventually. The trust documents for the farm had already been drafted with language broad enough to let me assume operation if I chose. Mr. Thompson believed George had been moving, slowly and awkwardly, toward bringing me in once he felt the place was better secured.
I laughed at that, but it came out rough.
“He picked a terrible time.”
“Yes,” Mr. Thompson said. “He did.”
After he left, I went out to the small cemetery at the edge of the property where a simple stone marked Patricia’s grave. George had planted peonies there years earlier. The blooms were long gone by then, but the leaves were still thick and green in the dusk.
I stood there and said out loud, “He should have told me.”
Then I said, “But I’m here now.”