I felt my throat tighten. “It’s — it was fine, Ruth, really, we don’t need to make a whole thing of it.”
“I think it does need to be a thing, actually,” she said, and there was something firm underneath the gentleness in her voice that I hadn’t heard from her before. “Kate, I need you to give me until this afternoon. There’s something I need to check on, and I want to talk to you again once I have.”
I asked her what she meant, but she only said, “Let me look into something first. I’ll call you back.”
She called back around noon. I was sitting at the kitchen table, the wreckage of Emma’s burnt Christmas dinner attempt still faintly clinging to the air of the kitchen, when my phone buzzed again.
“I found the clause,” Ruth said, her voice steady in a way that told me this wasn’t a small thing.
“What clause?”
“When I gave Robert and your mother the house,” she said, “I didn’t just hand it over without any conditions. I had my attorney draft language into the transfer, something I insisted on at the time, because I wanted to make absolutely sure that house never stopped being what it was supposed to be. I’ve had it filed away for years and honestly forgot the exact wording until this morning, when I went digging through my old file box.”
“What does it say?”
