Whatever you do about it now, do it fast. She's forty-two and she gave me six years and she has nowhere to be at three o'clock this afternoon.
I loved your mother for forty-one years and I loved this one for six and I am not going to rank them for anybody's comfort.
Look after her. She won't ask.
Bertrand Ozel folded the pages up.
Nobody moved for a long time.
I looked at the front row and Seraphine Ellery was sitting perfectly straight with her hands in her lap and she was not crying at all, which of course she wasn't, because she had done all of her crying in a house on Alder Street between 2019 and 2025 where nobody was looking.
Lucan got up and walked out of that building.
I want to be honest about that too. He did not go and sit next to her. He went outside and stood by his car for about twenty minutes and then he came back in for the burial.
He is forty-four years old and he has not yet been able to say the words out loud. He wrote her a letter in September. She wrote back. That's where that is.
I went and sat next to her.
I did not say anything for a while because there was nothing available that wasn't an insult.
Eventually I said, "Six and a half years."
And she said, "He asked me not to."
And I said, "That's not a good enough reason."
And Seraphine Ellery turned and looked at me for the first time in six and a half years — really looked at me, I mean, straight on — and she said:
"It was to me."
Some things about after.
The prenuptial agreement is real and it is exactly as he described it and I have read it four times. Prue Vandenberg had it in a file with a note on the front in my father's handwriting.
The trust accounts are real. Three hundred and eighty-one thousand dollars of the Vireo Lake sale went into home care between October 2021 and May 2025. Every invoice is in there. Night nursing three nights a week from March 2023, which is when she stopped being able to do the nights alone.
She was on her own with him the other four.
The estate is mine and Lucan's. All of it. That's what the document says and neither of us has any legal ability to change it, which I looked into in July.
What we did instead, in August, took about six weeks and a lot of argument.
Lucan wanted to give her a third. I wanted to give her half. We landed on forty percent and she refused it three times and then Prue Vandenberg, who is seventy-three and has no patience left, told her to stop being ridiculous in front of both of us.
She took it in October. She is buying a small place two towns over. She wants a garden.
The house on Alder Street is on the market. Neither of us could live in it and none of us can be in it.
I have been in therapy since August, which I have never done before, and about half of it is about my mother and the other half is about a car park on Hanley Street in August of 2018.
Because here is the thing I keep landing on.
My father sat in a car for forty minutes in a town he had lived in since 1971 and could not find his own house.
And the person who noticed, and made the appointment, and drove him, and sat in the car park, was a woman who worked at his front desk.
Not me. I called him on Sundays.
Not Lucan.
She had been the office manager at Ellery Millwork since 2010. Nine years. She was at my mother's funeral in April of 2018 and I did not know who she was and I did not ask, and four hundred people were there and she stood at the back.
I called her a gold digger at my brother's kitchen table in December of 2018, out loud, to his wife, while my nephew was in the room.
I did the arithmetic. Thirty-six years. I said the number like it was a verdict.
And it took a dead man, a sealed envelope, and a seventy-one-year-old funeral director reading two and a half pages in a room full of people, to make me ask a single question I could have asked in 2019 for free.
The headline everybody in Winsley used afterward — and people did use it, it went around — was that at his funeral, she finally got what she deserved.
They're right. That is exactly what happened.
It just took him being dead for six and a half years of silence to be worth anything, and it took two hundred witnesses, because he knew — he knew, in January of 2019, with a diagnosis eleven weeks old and his handwriting still steady — that his own children would not have believed her if she'd said it herself.
May you like
He was right about that as well.
That's the part I can't put down.
