Winifred’s response was not sympathy. Her response was logistics.
She has one grandchild-shaped hole in her understanding of her own life, and she was seventy years old, and she decided that the Kessler line was going to continue and that it was going to continue with Kessler blood in it.
She spoke to Landon.
Landon Kessler is thirty-four, does landscape design, and has spent his entire life being the son who was not the son. He told me, in a diner in Cordera, that his stepmother had never once asked him for anything until the day she asked him for that.
The arrangement was made privately and it was done properly at a facility, and Landon signed a document he did not have a lawyer read, and the intent — the whole intent, the reason Winifred slept at night — was that no one would ever know, because the babies would be Emory’s on paper and dark-haired like everyone else.
Bree came into it in the summer of 2023.
That order matters and it is the thing I have had the hardest time with. It was not that Emory fell in love with my best friend and then they had a family. It was that a carrier was needed, and Bree Tolliver had been sitting at that family’s table for eleven years being told she was one of them, and she was offered a permanent seat.
She was my friend for sixteen years. She drove me home from Alder Mesa twice.
The last thing in this section is the thing that ended whatever was left between me and that family.
When Roz finally got into it, Winifred produced documents, because she is the kind of woman who keeps everything.
She had a copy of the original andrology report.
She had had it since March of 2023.
Nine months later she stood up at the head of her Christmas table and took a bag out of my hands in front of sixteen people and told them some women just aren’t built for it.
PART 5 — TWO GIFTS, PART TWO
The financial matter was resolved by agreement in the spring. Twenty-two percent of Aventine plus the equalization for the diverted funds, and the four entities unwound. Emory is no longer an officer. He holds shares and attends nothing.
Roz says that if I had wanted to make it worse I could have. I did not want to make it worse. I wanted the house in Cordera off the mortgage and my name off his company, and I got both by August.
The clinic matter went where it had to go. I filed a complaint. So did two other former patients once it opened up, which is the part I did not anticipate and which I think about the most.
Bree wrote to me once, eleven pages, and the eleven pages are about how hard it has been for her.
I read four of them.
She and Emory did not last the year. He moved back to Cordera. She is in Harborlight with two toddlers and, from what I understand, a support order and not much else.
Landon and I are — this is going to sound strange — in touch.
He is the only person in the entire business who behaved decently when it came apart. He told the truth immediately, to everyone, at significant cost to himself, and he has been consistent about one thing since: those children exist, they did nothing, and whatever the adults did to each other is not something they should ever be handed as an inheritance.
