specificity, on the grounds that ambiguity in these situations tended to produce speculation that was frequently worse than the reality. I agreed with him in principle. But I also understood that
there was a difference between transparency and a recitation of documents, and what my children needed to understand first was not the content of what I had changed but the reason, because without the reason the content would read as punishment and it was not punishment.
It was clarity.
“I changed my will,” I said. “I changed the beneficiaries on my investment accounts. I changed the
life insurance policy. And I changed every code and lock on this property, which you discovered today.”
Lisa made a sound.
“The house?” Jennifer said.
“What about the house?” I said.
“Is the house in the will?”
I looked at my oldest daughter.
“Jennifer,” I said. “Think about that question. Think about what you just asked me.”
She blinked. Then the color came into her face in a way that told me she had heard herself.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said.
“How did you mean it?”
“I was just asking.”
“You were asking whether the house was still in the will,” I said. “Before you asked how I was, before you asked what I needed, before you asked whether I was scared or lonely or whether
taking an Uber home from the hospital alone was something that had bothered me. The house.”
Jennifer put her face in her hands.
Michael leaned forward.
“This isn’t fair,” he said. “You’re building a case. You’ve been building it for three months and now you’re presenting it and we don’t have any room to respond.”
“You have room to respond right now,” I said. “I told you I’d let you speak when I finished.”
“You haven’t finished.”
“Almost.”
He sat back.
I thought about Richard. Not for the first time that day, and not in the way grief usually arrives, which for me was still sudden and with full force even after thirteen years. I thought about him in
the specific context of this conversation, because Richard had known our children with a clarity I had sometimes allowed to be obscured by my need to believe the best of them. He had loved
them without illusion, which is rarer than it sounds and which I had only fully understood after he was gone.
