This was not a compelling explanation. The document had a visible title page. The title page was not numbered. Pages one and two were numbered. There was then a jump to page four.
“Where did you get this copy?” I asked.
“Dad gave it to me a while ago,” she said. “To keep on hand.”
“When?”
“A few months ago. I don’t remember exactly.”
Aunt June was very quiet. Deb had discovered something fascinating about her own thumbnail.
“I think I need to see the original,” I said.
“Hannah.” Vanessa’s voice had that note in it, the one that had always meant I was making things unnecessarily complicated. “This is not the time to be difficult.”
I put the papers down on the coffee table, very carefully, and said: “I’m not being difficult. The document has a page missing. I’d like to see the complete document.”
“You’re upset,” she said. “We’re all upset. This isn’t the moment to–“
“It’s exactly the moment,” I said.
And that was approximately when the room changed.
## What Vanessa Said
She said I had always done this. That was the first thing she said, when the civility broke. That I had always made things about myself, that even now, in the week after our father’s death, I couldn’t just let something be.
She didn’t say that I was wrong about the page numbers. She didn’t explain the jump from 2 to 4. What she said was that Dad had always struggled with me, that she had spent years watching him try to connect with me, that I’d been distant and difficult and now I wanted to make his will into a drama.