Chapter 3

Elena found her at the bench before Junie had even finished her coffee.

She came down the gravel path fast for a woman of seventy-four — not running, exactly, but moving with the particular purpose of someone who had decided that the conversation was not over and that she was going to be the one to end it. Her lavender cardigan was buttoned up against the morning wind off the river, her pearls catching the light, her white hair stiff in its wave, and behind her, a few steps slower, came Wade with his sunburned forehead and his hands stuck in his pockets.

"Junie," Elena said, stopping in front of the bench. "We need to talk."

Father Ray started to rise. "Maybe I should—"

"Sit down, Ray." Elena didn't look at him. Her deep-set gray eyes were fixed on Junie. "This is family business."

"Elena," Junie said, "there's nothing to talk about. I read the clause in front of the whole town. It's not a secret — you can look it up, you can have a lawyer look it up, you can—"

"I know what it says," Elena said. "I know exactly what it says. I signed the original trust documents when Marcus set it up." She paused, and her mouth tightened. "I was the one who told him to put in that clause."

Junie stared at her.

"It was my idea," Elena said. "Not Marcus's. He wanted to leave you the building outright, but I told him that was a mistake. I said, 'Marcus, you give her the building, and the next thing you know she's sold it to some developer and the Coleridge name is gone.' I told him we needed to keep the name with the trust so that—" She gestured at Wade, who had stopped a few feet away, his hands still in his pockets. "—so that the family could always come back to it."

"So you wrote a clause that gave the name back to the trust," Junie said slowly, "so the family could always come back to it."

"That's right."

"And you gave the trust to me."