much?”
He looked at the rain instead of her.
That was answer enough.
Lila sat down hard on the edge of a dining chair dusted with glass. I moved toward her, but she lifted a hand. Not cruelly. Just needing space.
She opened her father’s letter.
No one breathed while she unfolded the pages.
David’s handwriting filled them in dark blue ink, slanted and patient. Lila read silently at first. Her face changed line by line.
Anger cracked.
Grief came through.
Then something like wonder.
A small sound escaped her.
“What does it say?” Connor demanded, unable to bear a room where he did not control the meaning.
Lila looked up.
She did not answer him.
She looked at me.
“He knew,” she said.
I gripped the back of a chair. “Knew what?”
She read aloud, voice breaking but clear enough to cut through the rain.
Her father had written that love should never require shrinking. That if she ever found herself asking permission to be herself, she should come home, even if home had become only her mother’s kitchen table. He wrote that he had made me trustee not because he doubted Lila, but because he trusted that I would stand between her and anyone who mistook her kindness for weakness.
Then Lila stopped.
Her eyes moved to the final paragraph.
“What?” I whispered.
She pressed the page to her chest and began to cry in earnest.
Not delicate tears. Not pretty tears. The kind that come from a place deeper than pride.
I went to her then. Slowly, because my ribs screamed. Carefully, because she had reason to be angry. I knelt in front of her chair even though my knees protested and placed my hands in my lap.
“I am sorry,” I said.
She shook her head, tears falling onto the letter. “You should have given it to me.”
“I know.”
“I needed him.”
“I know.”
“I needed you.”
That broke me.
I bowed my head. “I was here. But I was afraid in the wrong direction.”
For a long moment, there was only rain and broken glass and the alarm still chirping somewhere in the ceiling.
Then Lila leaned forward and pressed her forehead to mine.
It was not forgiveness fully formed. It was not the end of what we would have to repair.
But it was contact.
And contact, after so much distance, felt like a match struck in a dark room.
Connor made a disgusted sound. “This is insane. You’re both being manipulated by a dead man’s sentimentality.”
Lila lifted her head.
The woman who looked at him then was not the woman who had stared at her phone while I lay on the floor.
“Leave,” she said.
Connor stared. “Excuse me?”
“Leave my house.”
He laughed. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“I’m calling the police. Then my bank. Then the board. Then every investor on your guest list.”
His expression hardened. “You’ll destroy us.”
“No,” she said. “You did that. I’m just turning on the lights.”
For one second, I thought he might strike her. I saw it in the way his shoulders shifted, the way his hand flexed at his side.
So I stood.
Daniel stepped forward too.
Connor looked from one of us to the other and seemed to
