And I need to act both at the same time. Dorothy looked at me steadily. What do you need? I need to find out what I actually have in my name, and I need to do it before they cash that ticket because once that money moves, everything becomes 10 times harder. We went inside through the back door. Derek and Cynthia were in the living room.
I could hear the television, a morning news program, the volume higher than necessary. The kind of deliberate noise that fills a room when the people in it don’t want to talk to each other or be overheard. I walked to my bedroom, closed the door behind me, and sat down at my small writing desk.
I am not a woman who panics. I have outlived a husband, a brother, a miscarriage, three layoffs during Roland’s working years, a cancer scare in 2015 that turned out to be nothing, and a flood in the basement in 2018 that destroyed 30 years of holiday photographs. Panic is a luxury for people who have not yet learned that it changes nothing.