“You know what’s interesting,” Maya said, scrolling through the spreadsheet, “is that the roof alone is almost a third of what you’ve documented so far.”
“Right.”
“And you have a note from your mom saying that should be repaid.”
“Right.”
“Does Daniel know about the note?”
“No. I don’t think so. It was between me and Mom.”
She looked at me carefully. “Claire.”
“I know.”
“That’s important.”
“I know it is.”
I hadn’t deliberately hidden the note. I’d put it in the folder and it had been there and I simply hadn’t been thinking about it in terms of what it meant legally or practically. I’d thought of it as a private acknowledgment between my mother and me. The idea of using it — using her words as evidence in a dispute with her son — felt wrong in a way I couldn’t quite articulate.
Maya said: “It’s a document she wrote. It reflects her wishes. It’s not using her as a weapon. It’s letting her have a say.”
I sat with that for a while.
The following Saturday we went through the rest of the folder. We found a few more things I’d forgotten, including a period in year four when I’d covered the water bill for six months while Mom’s pension was briefly disrupted. We also found two entries I’d initially planned to include that turned out, on careful review, to be duplicates — I’d paid something twice and only noticed when I looked at both copies.
“See, this is why you check,” Maya said.