I just sat there. All of it, every bit of it, came apart in about four seconds. The man who smelled like pine soap. The reason nobody ever said I looked like him. The drinking story everyone repeated at every funeral and Christmas for fifty years. He didn’t leave because he was a drunk. He left because of me. Because I existed. And Mom let the whole town believe he was the bad guy so I’d never have to carry it.

Karen finally spoke. “So we’re not even.” Her voice cracked. “We’re not even all the way sisters.”

“Half,” I said. It was the only word I could get out.

She reached across the table, not to fight this time. She put her hand on the open page, right over Mom’s handwriting, like she could press it back into the paper and make it not true. I put my hand on top of hers. We didn’t hug. We didn’t cry the pretty way you see in movies. We just sat there with our hands stacked on a dead woman’s secret, two old women who’d spent six months not speaking over a house and a pile of money that neither of us cared about anymore.

I won, see. I had the proof. Mom trusted me, it said so right there. I’d been so sure that meant I was the good one all along. Karen drove home the next morning.

We’ve talked twice since then, both times short, both times careful. The house is still mine. The journal’s in a drawer in my bedroom and I haven’t opened it again, and to be honest I don’t know that I ever will. I sit in the kitchen most mornings now with my coffee, in the house Mom left me because she owed me a father she couldn’t give back, and I think the same thing every single day.

She didn’t leave me the house because she trusted me. She left it to me because she was sorry. And I spent thirty years too busy fighting her to ever once ask her why.