Chapter 2

The first thing Ottilie did was close the front door.

It was a small thing, a single motion, her hand reaching past the door frame and pulling until the latch clicked. The sound cut through the porch noise — the idling truck, the wind in the maples, Mavis's voice starting to rise — and it changed the shape of the morning. The piano was inside. The radiator was on the porch. The KITCHEN box sat in the grass. But the door was closed, and Ottilie was on the outside of it with her hand on the handle.

Mavis stared at the closed door. Then she stared at Ottilie.

"You can't lock me out of my own—"

"It's not your house," Ottilie said.

The words came out flat and dry. She said them the way she'd said "no" to Nell a few minutes ago, the way she'd read the beneficiary line aloud — without heat, without the tremor that wanted to climb into her voice. Thirty years of carrying mail up and down these river roads had taught her how to keep her hands steady.

Mavis's face went through a series of small movements. Her jaw worked. Her eyes cut to the neighbor, still standing at the fence, still watching. She smoothed the front of her black vest with one hand, adjusted the gold watch on her wrist.

"Ottilie," she said, and her voice found its carrying pitch again, warm as a hostess introducing a guest, "I don't think you understand what's happening here. This house has been in the Brennan family for four generations. My mother grew up in that parlor. The piano—" She pointed at the door, at the walnut case just visible through the window. "—that piano belonged to my mother. She played it every Sunday. It's an heirloom. It has nowhere else to go."

Ottilie looked at the piano through the window. It stood in the hallway, one corner still catching the light, the walnut polished to a dull gleam.

"When was the piano bought?" she asked.

Mavis blinked. "What?"

"The piano. When did you buy it?"

"It was my mother's. I've told you—"

"From who?" Ottilie asked. Her voice didn't change. "Who did she buy it from?"

Mavis's mouth opened and closed. The neighbor shifted at the fence. Lloyd came out of the house through the mudroom door, wiping his hands on his khakis, and stopped when he saw the closed front door, the radiator on the porch, the box in the grass.

"Mom?" he said. "What's going on?"

"Your ex-wife," Mavis said, "is trying to keep me out of my own dead mother's house."

Lloyd looked at Ottilie. She stood at the porch rail with the mailbag on her shoulder, and she looked back at him with the same face she'd worn the day she'd handed him the divorce papers in this same spot, eleven years ago — patient, unhurried, waiting for him to catch up.

"Lloyd," Ottilie said. "The trust's annual statement came to the house last month. You forwarded it to me. You didn't read it."