“You said something, eventually,” I said. “You said maybe I had a point.”
“I said maybe you had a point about wanting to see the whole thing,” she said. “I should have said: Vanessa, those page numbers don’t match, what’s on page three.”
“Would it have helped?”
A pause. “Probably not right then,” she said. “But you wouldn’t have felt so alone in it.”
We talked for a while. She told me that Vanessa had called her separately, the night after the reading, and told her that Dad had had trouble with me over the years, that he’d mentioned in conversations with Vanessa that he’d always meant to talk to me about certain things but never had. Vanessa had framed this, Aunt June said, as an explanation for the omission — as if Hannah not being in the will was a final chapter in a complicated relationship, something sad but understandable.
“She was pretty convincing,” Aunt June said. “I’m embarrassed to say.”
“She’s always been convincing about things like this,” I said.
“What changed it for me was thinking about the page numbers,” Aunt June said. “If he’d left you out, there wouldn’t be a gap. The pages would just run.” A pause. “And you would have said something last night if you’d expected nothing. You said something because you expected something and it wasn’t there.”
“I have a text from him,” I said. “From eleven days before he died. He said the paperwork was done.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” June said.
“Yeah,” I said.