That evening, Blythe called me from Hawaii.
I almost didn’t answer. Then I did. Because she’s my son’s wife now. Whether I was there to see it or not.
“Mrs. Tumi.”
Her voice was small and wet.
“Please. My mother is so upset. She’ll never forgive me if this goes wrong.”
“If what goes wrong, Blythe?”
“Everything’s planned for after Saturday the twenty-sixth—”
She stopped short. Like somebody who’d stepped on a loose board.
“I mean coming home. Just coming home.”
“What’s planned for the twenty-sixth?”
“Nothing. Please don’t make this ugly. Cullen’s really hurt.”
Cullen was really hurt.
I was the one who found out from a stranger’s comment that I was supposed to be sick.
But I didn’t say that.
“I hope you’re enjoying the beach, Blythe,” I said. “Wear sunscreen.”
Everything’s planned for after Saturday.
Something was waiting for me on the twenty-sixth.
And apparently, I was the only person who hadn’t been told what.
On Thursday the seventeenth, at a quarter to four, the phone rang again.
Miles Havstock.
I’d given him my card at the engagement dinner. He’s the kind of man who keeps cards.
“Saraphina,” he said. Calm. Polite. Careful. Like a man walking across a dock he isn’t sure will hold. “I’ll be direct. Is there some kind of problem with the paperwork?”
“Which paperwork?”
A pause. I could hear a radio behind him. A forklift beeping. The sounds of a boatyard.
“For the house,” he said. “Cullen told me back in June it was done. Signed.”
I didn’t say anything.
In my old job, when a number doesn’t add up, the best thing you can do is let the other person keep talking.
“I made some decisions based on that,” Miles said.
“What decisions?”
“Business decisions. Family decisions.” He cleared his throat. “Is it signed or isn’t it?”
“There is no signed paperwork, Miles,” I said. “There never was.”
The silence on that line went on so long I checked whether the call had dropped.
“I see,” he finally said. Very quietly.
And he hung up.
I sat on my porch step with the phone in my lap.
Signed.
He’d used that exact word. And Cullen’s half sentence came back to me.
Miles thinks it’s done.
There was only one piece of paper in the whole world my son could possibly mean.
And it wasn’t at the point.
It was in a drawer in my front hall in Cranston. Where I’d put it in March.
Where, as far as I knew, nobody had ever touched it.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.