So that morning at the table, I finally said it. “There’s only one way to settle this.” I put my hand flat on the journal. “Six years she wrote in this thing. Let’s just read what she actually thought.”

Karen made a face but she didn’t say no. She came around to my side of the table and stood over my shoulder, and I started flipping. Most of it was ordinary. Doctor appointments. The weather. What she made for supper. Then I got to March of 2022, and Karen was reading right along with me, and I felt her go still behind me.

Mom had written, “Diane called again. We fought for an hour. She tells me I’m wrong about the roof, wrong about the contractor. She exhausts me.” Karen sort of snorted, like, see, there it is. But Mom wasn’t done. The next line said, “But she’s the only one who shows up.”

I felt Karen’s jaw tighten. I didn’t even have to look, I could feel it from where I sat.

I kept turning pages because now I needed to know too. A few weeks later Mom wrote about Karen. “Karen visited Sunday. Brought flowers. Stayed forty minutes. Agreed with everything. She always agrees. It’s its own kind of lonely.” I read it out loud without thinking, and the second it was out of my mouth I wished I hadn’t, because Karen made this small hurt sound behind me.

“Keep going,” she said. Her voice was flat. “Read the rest.”

So I did. And the next entry, oh, the next one. Mom wrote, “I love them both. But I respect the one who fights. I trust Diane. I left her the house.” There it was, in her own hand.

I’m not proud of what I felt right then, but I’ll tell you the truth. I felt like I’d won. Thirty years of being the difficult daughter, and here was Mom in black and white telling me I was the one she counted on.