“We want to make sure she has enough money to get settled.”

“We are being very generous.”

Sheriff Miller didn’t look at the paper.

He didn’t look at Charles or Victoria.

He looked straight at me, his gray eyebrows knitting together in the center of his forehead.

“Eleanor,” he said softly. “Is that what’s happening here?”

“Are you signing this because you want to?”

The room became so quiet I could hear the wind rattling the loose pane in the east window.

I looked down at the gold pen in my hand.

The metal felt cold, like a key to a room I didn’t want to enter.

I looked at the check for fifty thousand dollars.

To Victoria and Charles, fifty thousand dollars was a small price to pay to buy my silence.

It was the price of my thirty years with Garrett.

They wanted me back in my sister’s cramped, drafty trailer on the edge of the county line.

They wanted the town to believe I was just a temporary distraction in Garrett’s life, someone who took a handout and slipped away.