The Art of Inheriting Secrets(5)

“The house could go up for sale as soon as next week. She expects to get three mil.” His voice was this side of a chortle. “And she expects at least a couple of offers within hours.”

Even after taxes, that was a lot of money. It was also not surprising. California real estate was stratospheric, and anything in the Bay Area was even more ridiculous. West Menlo Park was adjacent to Stanford and a plethora of tech campuses. “We knew it would go like that.”

“We might really be able to buy this apartment, Olivia. That would be so awesome.”

It was something we’d never had a prayer of pulling off before this. Even renting it had been a massive stroke of luck. It belonged to friends of mine from the magazine who’d adopted a baby and wanted to move out of the city. It was a gorgeous space on the top floor of a good building, but the killer was an outdoor space as large as the apartment itself with views of the bay in one direction and the city center in another. The couple had been making noises about selling it over the past year, but until now, there’d been no way we could have raised the funds to even consider it.

Now, everything was happening at once. I’d trade it all for one more hour with my mother, drinking tea and talking about . . . anything. Rubbing a finger over my eyebrow to keep my emotions in check, I said, “Yeah, maybe.”

“Nancy is sending you an email,” he said, “but basically, she wants to clear out the house. No one will keep it”—the lot would be scraped in order to build something new—“so you might as well go ahead and get rid of everything.”

“No.” It pained me to think of all my mother’s things being handled by other people. Strangers. “I need to be the one to go through everything. I’ll only be here for a week or two, and when I get back, I can sort through it.”

“Would it really hurt anything to move it all to a storage facility?”

“What’s the rush? It’s only been a month.”

“Okay, sweetheart. Your call.” He was using the voice I’d come to know too well—the patient voice. The she’ll-feel-better-soon voice. There were times lately I didn’t even like this man, much less want to marry him. Many times. Sometimes I thought I’d never really loved him much at all. “I’ll let her know.”

“I’ll get everything here sorted out, and then I can deal with everything there. One thing at a time.”

“All right.” I could hear him take a deep breath. “But I want to point out that you’ve been in a holding pattern for months. Don’t you want to get back to your real life?”

The lake of grief in my chest sloshed a little. Maybe I wasn’t really angry with him but at the way events in the past eight months had overturned my life. A flash of my mother’s hands, splattered with paint as she stood before a canvas, washed over me, along with an image of those same fine, thin hands resting on her torso in the hospital.

Really, how could she possibly be gone? I kept waiting for someone to pop up and say it was all a mistake.

“I guess. I’m just not sure about anything right now.”

“I know, sweetheart. Why don’t you think about it for a day or two? Maybe the best thing would be to start the next chapter of your life as soon as possible. Nothing has been the same since the accident.”

In the lobby, the dog gave a short woof, as if to emphasize the point. “Look, someone is waiting for me right now. I’ve gotta go.”

“It’s all good. Love you.”

I almost said the words back, but they stuck in my throat, either a half truth or an untruth; I didn’t know which. Instead, I simply hung up. He probably didn’t even notice.

Rebecca drove a champagne-colored Range Rover, which carried us over the narrow roads between fields into a thick forest. “This is all part of the estate,” she said, waving a hand. “Almost two thousand hectares, most of it forest and farmland.”

I blinked. “Estate?”

“Rosemere.” She gave me a quizzical look. “Your estate.”

My grasp of land measurements was nonexistent, but it seemed like a lot. “Two thousand? That’s like a whole park or something, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s enormous. Didn’t you know?”

“I don’t know anything,” I admitted. “About any of it.”

“Your mother never told you?”

“Not even on her deathbed.”

We bumped onto a smaller lane, and she shot me another measuring glance I couldn’t quite interpret. Had I said something wrong?

“All right, then,” she said at last. “That gives us a place to start.”

The lane swerved downward, and a house came into view. “This is the beginning of our acreage, Dovecote,” she said, gesturing. “The boundary between Rosemere and us is this bank of trees.” The house, rambling and whitewashed with a thatched roof, sat at the edge of a lush paddock where a trio of horses grazed.

“Gorgeous horses,” I commented.

“Do you ride?”

“No, not really.” I smiled. “I’m guessing you do.”

She laughed, and again I noticed how unlike it was from everything else about her, loud and hooting. “I do,” she said. “But mainly I breed racehorses. Point-to-point, amateur steeplechase, not the big leagues. The big gray is my champion,” she said. “Pewter.”