It was everybody’s place now.
That’s what a street decides when three cars pull up in a row.
Kiara sat in the driver’s seat with the engine off for a full minute.
“I haven’t been inside since the fight,” she said. “Three years. I don’t even know if my key works.”
“Mine does,” I said. “Patrice gave it to me. For Sundays.”
Kiara looked at the key in my hand for a long moment.
“She gave you a key to my grandfather’s house,” she said, “so you could be me.”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re giving it to me so I can be me.”
“Yes.”
She took it.
Patrice was in the kitchen.
She had boxes.
She had a garbage bag, and in it, when Lorna Pike asked her to set it down, were three years of letters from Kiara Booker to her grandfather, unopened, addressed in a hand that started grown-up and, over thirty-one envelopes, got slowly angry, and then stopped.
Kiara looked at the bag.
She did not say anything.
She did not have to.
The bag said everything the tape hadn’t.
“You kept them,” Kiara said finally. “You didn’t even throw them away. You just — kept them from him.”
“He couldn’t read them, Kiara, what was I supposed to—”
“You could have read them to him.”
The kitchen went absolutely still.
Through the window, the Alder Street porches were still too.
And into that stillness, Patrice Booker-Hale — who had not said one true thing in this story yet — said her first.
“He’d have chosen you.”
“What?”
“Over me. He always did. You were Loretta’s laugh and I was the one who stayed and did the work, and he’d have given you everything, and I—” She stopped. “I just wanted, one time, to be the one in the room.”
“You were the one in the room, Aunt Patrice,” Kiara said quietly. “For three years. You were the only one. You had him all to yourself, and you spent it robbing him.”
Lorna Pike stepped forward.
“Mrs. Booker-Hale, I’m going to need the watch.”
Patrice looked down at the Cartier on her wrist.
The watch a private had saved eleven months for.
The one that ticked as steady as he did.
“It’s a family—”
“It’s in the will,” Mr. Abernathy said. “Item three. ‘To Kiara, from whose wrist it was taken.'”
Patrice unclasped it.
Her hands were not steady.
