Chapter 16
beside the hospital bed.
I remembered calling home
and getting no answer.
Later,
Mom had sent a brief text.
Hope you're feeling better.
I had assumed she was busy.
Now I knew she had believed
I didn't want her there.
“Oh, Fay,” she whispered.
“I should have come.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You should have.”
She cried harder.
I sat at my kitchen table
with tears slipping down my own face.
For once,
neither of us tried to make
the other person's feelings disappear.
After a while,
Mom said,
“I don't know how to fix this.”
I looked at the trees outside.
“Neither do I.”
Then I added,
“But we can stop pretending
it didn't happen.”
That was the first conversation
in years that felt entirely honest.
Not comfortable.
Not easy.
Honest.
And I began to understand
that those three things
were not always supposed to arrive together.
The first formal letter to Ranata
went out the following Thursday.
Miriam sent it.
Not me.
It requested preservation of records
and proposed a supervised exchange
of relevant financial documents.
Ranata responded through an attorney
who disputed nearly everything.
According to her first response,
our parents had voluntarily supported her business.
The references to my farm,
she claimed,
were simply family shorthand
for broader household assistance.
I read the letter twice.
Then I put it down.
“Can she really say that?” I asked.
Miriam folded her hands.
“She can make that argument.
Whether the evidence supports it
is a different matter.”
“And the signatures?”
“We're examining those separately.”
I leaned back.
The conference room smelled faintly
of coffee and fresh paper.
Outside the windows,
ordinary people walked through the afternoon sunshine.
For them,
it was just another Thursday.
For me,
it was the first time
I had seen my own life
described as a convenient misunderstanding.
Miriam watched me.
“You don't have to answer every accusation.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I smiled faintly.
“I'm learning.”
She slid a folder toward me.
“Then start by understanding this.
Your sister's version of events
is not automatically entitled
to equal weight with documented facts.”
I looked at the folder.
Inside were copies
of my property tax payments,
insurance statements,
equipment purchase records,
and business filings.
Fifteen years of work.
Fifteen years of evidence.
For so long,
I had felt compelled
to explain why my life was respectable.
Now a stranger
had assembled the proof
without asking me to justify my choices.