Only then did I sit down behind the wheel and look at the papers properly.
There was no confusion left after that. No room for misunderstanding or family diplomacy or maybe-they-meant-well foolishness. Whatever still lived inside me that wanted to protect Peter broke cleanly in that parking spot.
Because Peter’s name was right there. He had not been manipulated from the sidelines. He was inside it. Signing it. Building it.
I drove not to the hotel but straight into town.
There are names that rise in your mind in moments of true urgency the way flares rise in darkness. One of those names was Mara Quinn. She was a real estate attorney in Newport, a woman ten years younger than I was and as sharp as cut glass.
Twenty-two years earlier, when her daughter needed a prom dress altered in forty-eight hours during the worst period of Mara’s life, she had come to my workroom with panic in her eyes. I had stayed up all night and refused extra money. She had never forgotten it.
