Chapter 8: Her Mother’s Name
Christina stared at the file name until the laptop dimmed.
I reached for the trackpad, then stopped. “Do you want me to open it?”
She looked at me, not the screen. “I want to know why it’s there.”
Rebecca set a glass of water beside her. In the next room, Leo slept with the small family photograph tucked beneath one hand. The house was quiet, but the old laptop fan whined as if it knew what we were about to find.
Christina clicked.
The file opened to a scanned page, then another. Property records. A printed map of the road leading to the lakeside house. A list of questions in someone’s neat, narrow handwriting: Who holds title? Is the boathouse included? Has the property ever been listed? The dates ran back five years.
At the bottom of one page, a name had been typed beside a phone number.
Florence Fairmont.
Christina pulled in a breath through her teeth. “She was asking about the house before she was dating you.”
I leaned closer to the screen. The questions were too exact to belong to casual curiosity. Someone had noted the shoreline, the access road, the buildings tucked beyond the trees. The house we had always treated as a family refuge had been reduced to lines on a page.
“How did she even know it existed?” Rebecca asked.
Christina shook her head. “Mom told me somebody had been asking about it.”
Her fingers hovered above the keyboard. For a moment, she seemed to be listening to a voice from years ago, one that the rest of us couldn’t hear.
“She’d come home from a charity event,” Christina said. “There was this woman there who knew the property’s name. She asked what was on the other side of the boathouse, whether the road washed out in winter. Mom thought it was strange.”
“Did she know the woman was Florence?” I asked.
“No. Not then.”
Christina clicked the next image.
A photograph filled the screen. Margaret stood beneath a string of outdoor lights, one hand around a paper cup, laughing at something beyond the frame. Beside her was a younger Florence, dressed in a dark blue jacket, her face turned toward the camera.
My stomach tightened. I knew that smile. I had seen it across dinner tables, in the bridal suite, in the reflection of the ballroom windows.
Christina touched the screen lightly, near her mother’s shoulder.
“She told me she’d never met Mom,” she said.
The words landed harder than an accusation shouted across the room. Christina didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to.
I looked at the photograph again. Margaret’s face was open and warm. Florence’s expression was harder to read; she might have been smiling for the camera, or for the person taking it. Either way, she had stood beside my wife and let me believe they’d never crossed paths.
Christina closed the photograph.
“I thought Mom was being cautious,” she said. “She said the woman had asked questions that didn’t sound like questions about a family home. She said it felt like the woman was measuring it.”
Rebecca leaned against the counter. “Did your mother tell you her name?”
“No. She didn’t know it.” Christina’s jaw tightened. “And I didn’t think it mattered. Not until Florence told me there was nothing about the house worth keeping.”
A small sound came from the next room. Leo shifted in his sleep, then went still. Christina glanced toward the doorway, her face softening for a breath before she turned back to the screen.
I wanted to offer an explanation, some story that would make the photograph less damning. But the questions on the page were in front of me, and so was my daughter. I had spent too long making excuses for what I wanted to believe.
I took out my phone.
“Claude,” Christina said.
“I need to know what he knew.”
Her eyes stayed on mine. “Then ask him what he knew. Don’t decide for him.”
I called. It rang four times before Claude answered.
“What?”
His voice sounded thin and far away, as if he’d been running or hiding. I put the call on speaker and set the phone beside the laptop.
“Florence knew about the lake house before she met me,” I said. “She asked questions about it five years ago.”
Silence.
Christina leaned toward the phone. “Did you know?”
A faint exhale came through the speaker. “I knew she’d asked about the family’s finances.”
“That wasn’t my question,” Christina said.
“I didn’t know she’d met your mother. I didn’t know about that photograph.”
“But you knew she was looking into us.” Christina’s voice stayed level. “Before she was with my father.”
Claude didn’t answer at once. I heard a door close on his end, then the low scrape of a chair.
“She came to me saying she wanted to understand the family’s assets,” he said. “She said she was considering a future with Jonathan and didn’t want to walk into it blind.”
“Were you already helping her?” I asked.
“No.” His pause was brief, but it was there. “Not then.”
“Why did she need the details?”
“I thought she was being practical.”
The same old defense, dressed in a different suit. I tightened my grip on the phone.
“You knew she was studying our finances before she pursued me.”
“I knew she was asking questions,” Claude said. “I didn’t know what she intended to do with the answers.”
“Did you tell yourself that because it was easier?” Christina asked.
The line went quiet. I could picture him at his desk, avoiding the family photographs that used to sit beside his paperwork. I had trusted him with the dull, private details of my life because I believed there was nothing dangerous in them. He had helped someone else study those details while I mistook familiarity for loyalty.
“Yes,” he said at last. “It was easier.”
Christina’s eyes glistened, but her voice didn’t break. “You helped her see my mother’s home as something to take.”
“I didn’t know she’d gone that far.”
“You knew she was asking.”
“I know.” Claude’s reply was almost a whisper. “I should have told you.”
For one suspended moment, nobody spoke. Then Christina pushed the laptop away as if the photograph had burned her.
“Why tell us now?” I asked. “What changed?”
“Because she called.”
My shoulders tightened. “When?”
“Just now. She said she was going to the lake.”
The faint buzz of the laptop fan seemed suddenly too loud.
“Why?” Christina asked.
Claude swallowed audibly. “She said there was something she had to get before the buyer arrived.”
“What something?”
“I don’t know.”
May you like
“You expect me to believe you don’t know?”
“I’m telling you what she said.” He took a ragged breath. “She’s gone to the lakeside house to remove something before the buyer arrives.”
