Chapter 4
I looked closely at Brianna’s photograph.
Celeste and Daniel sat in a booth, leaning toward each other over a stack of papers. The date in the corner was six days earlier.
“Why did you take it?” I asked.
“I was meeting a friend at the same restaurant. Mom said she was at a dentist appointment.”
“Did she see you?”
“No.”
I asked Brianna to send the original photograph to Mara. She did it while we stood beside the elevators.
“I don’t want Mom to lose everything,” she said.
“Neither do I. I want to know whether company money was taken.”
“She’ll say I betrayed her.”
“You can tell her why you sent it. You don’t need to ask her permission to tell the truth.”
Brianna nodded, but she looked frightened.
I went home and tried to work through the next day’s schedule. I couldn’t stop seeing the empty space where my mother’s photographs had once hung in the dining room. The papers in my folder said I had a claim to the house. They couldn’t give me back the months I’d spent wondering whether I was welcome there.
The next morning, Mara called. The Northstar address was leased by a company registered under Daniel Cross’s sister’s name. The connection did not prove Celeste knew about the payments. Mara was asking an outside accountant to review them.
Dad invited me to lunch at a small café near the office. He looked tired, but he had kept his appointment with his doctor and promised not to skip the next one.
“I spoke to Brianna,” he said.
“How is she?”
“Upset. She asked whether she and Celeste would have to leave the house tonight.”
“What did you say?”
“That no one is being put on the street. I also told her we won’t pretend last night didn’t happen.”
I stirred my soup.
“Celeste called me a stranger in front of her.”
“I heard.”
“I kept thinking you would come home and believe Celeste.”
Dad set down his spoon.
“I gave you reason to worry about that. When you tried to tell me before, I made excuses.”
“I didn’t want to make your marriage harder.”
“You weren’t the one making it hard.”
I looked at him. For years, Dad had moved through life with a solution to every problem. He sounded uncertain now. I appreciated that he wasn’t trying to talk past what had happened.
“Will you ask her about Mom’s pictures?” I said.
“I already did. She told me she put them away because they upset her.”
“They were there long before she moved in.”
“I’ve asked that they be brought back. I’d like you to choose where they go, if you want.”
“I do.”
He reached across the table and covered my hand.
That evening, Mara found an invoice that carried Celeste’s initials beside a note requesting fast payment. Dad stared at the scan for a long time.
“Those are her initials,” he said. “But she could say someone wrote them.”
“That’s why we keep checking,” Mara replied.
I stayed after the meeting to help identify the event. It had been a charity dinner Celeste hosted under the company’s name. I had attended. Northstar billed us for staging and guest management, but our own staff had done both.
Brianna had worked the event. I called her and asked what she remembered.
“There was a man helping Mom,” she said. “He had a Northstar badge. I thought he was there because Daniel hired him.”
“Did he bring equipment?”
“No. He mostly walked around with a clipboard.”
“Do you know his name?”
She paused.
“Victor. I remember because Mom kept calling him when the guest list changed.”
Mara thanked her and asked her to write down anything else she recalled. Brianna sounded relieved to have something concrete to do.
On Friday, I went to Dad’s house to look for Mom’s photographs. Dad was there. Celeste had gone out with Brianna.
We found the frames wrapped in towels in a closet. One corner of Mom and me on the porch was chipped. I ran my thumb along it.
“Did she do this on purpose?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know.”
I didn’t want to turn every accident into proof of cruelty. I also couldn’t ask myself to ignore what I knew.
We carried the pictures into the sitting room. Dad held up the largest one, taken on the day the house was finished.
“Your mother chose every window,” he said.
“I remember her standing in the empty living room, telling us where the Christmas tree would go.”
“She was right about the light.”
We hung the photograph over the mantel together.
When Celeste came home, she stopped in the doorway. Her eyes went to the picture.
“You put that back.”
“Yes,” Dad said.
“In my living room?”
I felt Dad turn toward me, but I answered for myself.
“It’s a family photograph. I want it here.”
Celeste’s gaze dropped to the folder on the table.
“Now that you own the place, I suppose you can do whatever you like.”
Dad took a step forward.
“Emma didn’t need ownership papers to belong here.”
Celeste’s mouth tightened. She walked upstairs without replying.
Brianna remained by the front door. She looked at the photograph, then at me.
“I remember that day,” she said quietly. “Your dad showed it to me when I first moved in.”
I nodded.
May you like
Then her phone rang. She checked the screen, and the color left her face.
“It’s Daniel,” she said. “He wants to know whether Mom has told Richard about Northstar.”
