Chapter 5

Elena arrived twenty minutes later in a yellow raincoat that was too short for her shoulders, water dripping from the hood onto the kitchen floor. She stood in the doorway of the apartment and looked at the wallet on the table, the folded note beside it, the title company letter propped against the salt shaker.

"Show me," she said.

Corinne opened the wallet, took out the note, and unfolded it on the table. The creases guided it flat. The circled paragraph faced Elena like an eye opening.

Elena read it slowly. Her lips moved over the words — the buyout clause, the third-party condition, the calendar year. Then she read her grandfather's circle, and she read her father's signature beneath the notary stamp, and she looked up at her mother with her father's square jaw and her mother's patient eyes.

"Dad signed this in 1998," she said. "Before I was born."

"He was twenty-six."

"He was twenty-six, and he signed a contract that said if he ever used the buyout to buy property for someone else, the money would come back to your family." Elena shook her head slowly. "And he never read it."

"He never read it," Corinne agreed. "Or he read it and forgot. I don't know which is worse."

Elena sat down at the table. She picked up the note and held it in both hands, the paper soft as cloth between her fingers. She was looking at the signature the way a person looks at a scar.

"I always thought he was careless," Elena said quietly. "I thought — the divorce, the way he treated you, the way he'd promise things and then — I thought he was careless. But this is different."