“No,” I said firmly.
Alyssa looked at me, startled.
“You don’t get to pick and choose based on guilt,” I told her. “If you’re his daughter, you’re his daughter. You take the share. We aren’t buying you off with tuition reimbursement. We are acknowledging you as a rightful heir. If we have to sell the south pasture, we sell the south pasture.”
Mr. Abernathy looked between us. He let out a long sigh that sounded like a tire deflating.
“Very well,” he said, reaching for his legal pad. “But I will need to bill for extra hours. This is going to be a paperwork nightmare.”“Bill away,” I said.
Walking out of that office, into the bright, blinding sunlight of the parking lot, I felt a strange shift. Inside, I had fought for her. I had aligned myself with her against the skepticism of the old guard.Alyssa stopped by her car—a beat-up Honda Civic that rattled when it idled.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said. “The land… that’s your dad’s legacy.”“He’s your dad too,” I said. The words tasted like copper in my mouth, strange and metallic, but true. “And his legacy is apparently more complicated than dirt and stocks.”
She smiled, a fleeting, watery thing. “Thank you, Margaret.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” I warned her. “Wait until you see the property tax bill.”
The legal side was math. The social side was warfare.We live in a town of eight thousand people. In a town this size, secrets don’t stay buried; they just compost until they sprout weeds.
