There was no confusion left after that. No room for misunderstanding or family diplomacy or maybe-they-meant-well foolishness. Whatever still lived inside me that wanted to protect Peter broke cleanly in that parking spot.
Because Peter’s name was right there.
He had not been manipulated from the sidelines. He was inside it. Signing it. Building it.
I folded the pages carefully, placed them back in my purse, and drove not to the hotel but straight into town.
Newport has a way of looking expensive even in winter. The houses stand with their polished brass and old money bones, and the harbor, even under a gray sky, seems to insist on grace. I parked two blocks from Thames Street and went first to the county records office, then stopped outside before going in because suddenly I knew I would need help.
Not family help.
Professional help.
There are names that rise in your mind in moments of true urgency the way flares rise in darkness. One of those names for me was Mara Quinn.
Mara was a real estate attorney in town, a woman ten years younger than I was and as sharp as cut glass. Twenty-two years earlier, when her daughter needed a prom dress altered in forty-eight hours and Mara herself had been freshly divorced and pretending competence while her life came apart around the edges, she had come to my little workroom in Philadelphia with panic in her eyes and gratitude in her hands. I had stayed up all night fixing the dress and refused extra money. Years later, after she moved to Rhode Island for work, she never forgot it. Whenever she heard I was in town, she would send over muffins or ask me to dinner or say if I ever needed anything legal, anything at all, to call.
I called.
She answered on the second ring.
“Rosalind?”
“Mara,” I said, and even to my own ears my voice sounded too calm. “Are you in your office?”
A beat of silence.
“Yes.”
“I need help.”
“Come now.”
Her office was above a marine insurance agency near the harbor, all pale wood and neat files and one large window overlooking wet pavement and a strip of gray water beyond the marina. She took one look at my face when I walked in and closed the door herself.
“What happened?”
I set my purse on her desk, took out the conservatorship petition and the listing pages, and handed them to her.
Then I told her everything.
