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.

By late morning I had arranged to meet Jenna in a café in the nearest town, neutral ground, far enough from the farm to cut the emotional theatrics and close enough to keep her from being fully absorbed into her uncles’ orbit before I could reach her.

The town itself was the kind of place that could have existed in Montana, Wyoming, or rural Colorado if you blurred the flags and road signs. Grain elevators. A feed store. A diner with a hand-painted sign in the window promising all-day breakfast. Pickup trucks parked diagonally on Main Street. A church, a hardware store, a Tim Hortons attached to a gas station. Places like that tend to look simple until you realize they contain enough memory to outlast whole cities.

Jenna arrived fifteen minutes late in a camel coat and city boots not made for slush or gravel. She looked beautiful, tired, and defended.

“I can’t stay long,” she said instead of hello. “Uncle Robert is taking me to meet the family attorney this afternoon.”

Uncle Robert.

I stirred my coffee slowly. “That was fast.”

She sat across from me and folded her arms. “Why are you making them sound sinister? They’ve been kind to me.”

Kind. The oldest disguise in the book.