I looked at Avery.
“What about Mitch?”
Her face changed.
“He knew.”
Something in me broke.
“How much?”
“I don't know how much at the beginning.”
“But later…”
She swallowed.
“Enough.”
My brother had looked at me at eighteen while I packed a duffel bag.
I'm sorry about all this, Stace.
He had known I was about to disappear from his fiancée's world.
Maybe he didn't yet know the insurance.
But he knew the lie.
“What did Grandma leave me?”
Mara opened another file.
An eighteen-acre piece of land in Chilton County.
My breath stopped.
“Where?”
She showed me the map.
I knew the road immediately.
It bordered Ruth's peach farm.
I stared.
“No.”
My grandmother had owned the wooded parcel beyond Ruth's southern fence.
I had walked beside it for years without knowing.
“When did she buy it?”
“Ten years ago.”
“Why?”
Mara gave me another note.
Stacey needs land where nobody can make her leave by eleven.
