Peter moved into the guest room that evening. He claimed he was giving me room to grieve, but he stopped asking about my day and barely looked at me. The silence felt less like space and more like punishment.
Exactly three weeks after the lawyer’s call, Peter entered the kitchen while I was making dinner. He placed a business card for a divorce attorney beside my cutting board.
“I think we should separate,” he said.
I turned off the stove. “Because I won’t buy you a new life with Mom’s money?”
He flinched, then insisted we had wanted different things for years. According to him, the inheritance had merely exposed how selfish I had become. Yet when I asked whether he had already discussed the estate with his attorney, his silence answered me.
Part of me wanted to shout. Instead, I remembered Mom sitting across from me after one strained dinner, telling me that anger could make a person miss the move that mattered most. I took a breath and asked Peter whether divorce was truly his decision.
“It’s best for both of us,” he replied, though he would not meet my eyes.
I walked into the home office and opened the safe. Inside was a folder Mom’s lawyer had urged me to read carefully. Grief had kept me from examining every page, but one highlighted provision had stayed in my mind.
I carried the folder back and slid it toward Peter.
“Before you file anything,” I said, “you need to know what my mother planned.”
