*Your instincts were right*, I wrote back. *Thanks for trusting them.*
She sent a thumbs up. That was the end of the conversation, and it felt like the end it deserved.
## The House
The house sold in March, five months after my father died. It went for more than the initial estimate because the market was doing something unexpected that spring. The net proceeds, after the realtor’s fee and a few other legitimate costs, were slightly better than the projections.
I didn’t go back for the sale. Vanessa handled the logistics — the clearing out, the staging, the negotiations with the realtor. This was partly because she lived nearby and I lived in Portland. It was partly because some division of labor had been reached, tacitly, in which she managed the practical pieces and I waited for the accounting.
She sent me photos of the house, empty, just before the closing. I hadn’t asked for them. She sent them anyway.
The kitchen looked larger without the table. The hallway looked shorter without the coats hanging by the door. My father’s study, which had always felt cramped, looked like a perfectly reasonable room with nothing in it.
I looked at the photos for a long time. Then I put my phone down and went back to what I’d been doing.
The grief and the inheritance situation had become two separate things in my mind, which I think is the only way to survive having them happen simultaneously. My father was gone. That fact did not depend on probate or page counts or what Vanessa had told Aunt June. My father was gone and he had sent me a picture of a fern and he had added a page to his will and those were both true and neither of them brought him back.