Complicated

She said: "You were always too ambitious for your own good."

Not I don't believe this.

Not tell me your side. Not even your sister called me.

Just that. Seven words, delivered in the voice she reserved for facts about weather and traffic.

Too ambitious.

As if ambition were a character flaw she had been cataloguing since my childhood, waiting for the right occasion to present the bill.

I stood in the middle of my living room with the phone pressed to my ear and the lake going dark outside the windows and I thought about the word ambitious and all the shapes it had taken over the years. The scholarship applications she hadn't attended the ceremony for because Ashley had a dance recital that same afternoon. The first client I landed, a small tech firm, whose contract I had signed at a Panera Booth because I didn't yet have an office, and I called her from the parking lot, shaking with relief, and she had

Always too much of the wrong thing.

Never enough of whatever the right thing was supposed to look like.

"Mom," I said carefully, "did Ashley tell you why she came here?"

"She told me what she found out." A pause. The sound of something being set down in her kitchen. A mug, probably. She had always held a mug when conversations required her to be still. "About the inheritance."

"There is nothing to find out. I have records going back to the day I incorporated the business. I have tax returns. I have five years of bank statements."

"Money can be moved around."

I blinked.

Money can be moved around.

My own mother.

"Are you saying you think I laundered

"I'm saying it's complicated."

"It is not complicated. It is completely straightforward. My share of the inheritance was forty-two thousand dollars. This house cost nine hundred and eighty thousand. The math alone—"

"Mandy." Her voice shifted into the register that meant stop explaining, you're embarrassing yourself. "Your sister is very upset."

"I understand she's upset. She's wrong, but I understand she's upset."

"She wouldn't make something like this up."

I sat down on the arm of the cream chair.

Outside the window, the last of the light was leaving the lake the way it always did — slowly, then all at once.

"Why not?" I asked.

Silence.

"I'm genuinely asking, Mom. Why wouldn't she? She has done this before. The beach house when we were teenagers. The car. The story about the summer program." I stopped myself. "Actually — don't answer. I'm not going

"Amanda—"

"I'm going to call David Kessler."

Another pause. David Kessler was the attorney who had handled my grandmother's estate. He was seventy-one years old and had practiced family law for forty-three of them and he had known my grandmother since she was a young woman and he had very little patience for what he called post-inheritance theater.

I had his home number because my grandmother had made me memorize it the last summer she was well, sitting at her kitchen table with her address book open between us, telling me in her particular quiet way that documentation was the only armor that held up in the rain.

She had known her family.

She had loved them anyway.

But she had known them.

"You don't need to involve David," my mother said. Her voice had changed slightly. Something underneath it had shifted, the way ice shifts before it gives.

"I think I do."

"It will make things worse."

"Things are already worse, Mom. Ashley showed up in my home and told me it belonged to her. Brent told me to hand it over before it got ugly. And you called their accusation complicated." I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum. A habit. My therapist had called it self-soothing. I had called it keeping myself from flying apart. "What exactly would better look like from here?"

She was quiet for so long that I thought the call might have dropped.

Then she said, in a smaller voice than I expected: "Your father wants to talk to you."

"Put him on."

A sound of movement. Footsteps. The muffled exchange of a phone passed between two people who had already decided what they thought.

My father's voice came on the line, gruff and careful, the voice of a man who loved his daughters in the way some men love things — deeply but without much ability to show it sideways.

"Amanda."

"Dad."

"Your sister is very worked up."

"I know."

"Brent has been talking to a lawyer."

I closed my eyes. "Of course he has."

"I'm not saying it's right," he said, and I heard something in that — a thin seam of something — that I held onto. "I'm saying you should be prepared."

"I've been prepared since before they showed up at my door." I opened my eyes. The lake was nearly dark now, just a faint pewter line at the horizon. "I saved for this house for five years, Dad. You watched me do it. You were there when I got my first corporate account. You were there when I lost it. You helped me move into the office space on Halsted, and I paid you back—"

"I know."

"—every dollar, with interest, because I insisted."

"I know, Amanda."

"So why," I said, and my voice finally broke, just slightly, the way the surface of something very controlled finally does when the pressure has been building long enough, "why is the question even open?"

He was quiet.

Not the hard quiet my mother had used.

A softer quiet. A weighted one.

"Because," he said finally, "your sister cried."