My voice came out quieter than I intended, which was somehow worse than if I had shouted it. I stood at the foot of the stairs with the empty velvet case in my hands and said it again, louder this time, so that anyone within range of the front door could hear it. “Where are the earrings?”
Diana appeared in the doorway of the living room.
She had followed me inside, which told me she still believed she could manage this the way she had always managed things, through forward momentum and the assumption that her version of events would eventually prevail if she said it confidently enough. “Those are being kept safe,” she said. I turned around slowly.
“Where are they, Diana.”
“I packed certain valuables for safekeeping while the house was unoccupied. Any reasonable person would have done the same.”
Evelyn had come inside behind her. She was already scanning the room, her eyes moving from the sticky notes on the furniture to the open boxes to the silver polish on the dining room table, and her expression had the quality it got when she was compiling information that would be useful later, calm and attentive and giving nothing away.
“Removing property from a trust asset,” Evelyn said, without looking up from her survey of the room, “without authorization from the trustee constitutes conversion. That is a civil matter at minimum and potentially a criminal one depending on the value of the items removed and the intent behind their removal.”
Diana’s voice sharpened. “I wasn’t removing anything.
I was protecting the estate.”
“The estate,” I said, “is not yours to protect.”
My father had come inside as well. He stood near the front door with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the sticky notes on the furniture, at the open cedar chest, at the empty velvet case in my hands, and he had the expression of a man who has been living inside a story he mostly believed and is being shown, all at once, what the story actually contained. I recognized the expression because I had seen versions of it on his face before, at family dinners where something Diana said landed wrong and he would go briefly quiet before finding his way back to the interpretation of events that was easiest to live inside.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
