I got up and then sat back down, fast and furious. “I tried, John. I made room for you right until you had the nerve to be surprised that I won that election. Not once did you say, ‘Good job, Barb,’ or ‘I’m proud of you.’ Not once in this entire year! Instead, you found an idiotic woman who can’t even spell, because why, exactly? I wasn’t good enough? Because I had the nerve to get older? Maybe this stroke is exactly what you deserved.”

Tears spurted out of my eyes. Oh, the fury. Sometimes it felt exactly like grief.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Sadie

My mom, who thought she knew everything, was irritatingly correct about the little house for sale.

It had a leaking roof, one tiny bathroom on the first floor with a rusting iron tub and no shower, two bedrooms, one of which was too small to fit a twin bed (so they called it a bedroom because . . . ?) and floors that sloped so much, a marble would roll from one end of the house to the other. The kitchen was outfitted with harvest-gold appliances and Ikea’s cheapest cabinets. One cupboard gaped open like a loose tooth. The kitchen was big enough for maybe four people, and the living room had stained beige carpeting and drafty windows. There was no garage, and the basement was made from stone and had a dirt floor and evidence of a recent squirrel rager, based on the litter and tiny little footprints in the dust on the workbench.

We went outside and walked around the . . . well, the structure. It wasn’t quite a house just yet. Juliet closed her eyes and shook her head.

“I’ll take it,” I told Ellen, the real estate agent.

“Seriously?” she said. “I mean, great! It’s a . . . unique property.”

It was.

“You’re an idiot,” Juliet said, tilting her head to squint at the house. It did look straighter that way. “Looks like it’ll collapse in a strong wind.”

“Ah, what do you know? You’re just an architect. By the way, do you do any pro bono work?”

She smiled a little, which was nice to see. Jules hadn’t smiled much since Dad’s stroke. She did have a point about the building in front of us. But I was one of the few people in Connecticut who viewed an eleven-hundred-square-foot house as spacious, and if there was another house I could afford in Stoningham before I won Powerball, it was invisible, like Wonder Woman’s plane.

“I’ll draw up the papers,” said Ellen, getting into her car before my sanity was restored.

“You can live with me, you know,” Juliet said.

“We’d kill each other. It might scar the girls, seeing their mother and aunt lying in pools of blood.”

“True. Well, you have a nice view, I’ll give you that.”