Chapter 13: One Condition

Lena's POV

Joan held the pen out to me with the cap already off.

I took it and read the page standing up, because that is how I read everything.

It was one typed sheet on company letterhead.

It said I would leave the house by the sixteenth, accept sixty thousand dollars, and make no claim on the Dahlberg name or the business.

It had a line for my signature and a line for Joan's.

"Lena," Nolan said. "Don't."

"Be quiet, Nolan. I'm working."

He closed his mouth.

I have typed the words "I swear" for eleven years.

I know exactly what a signature is worth, and it is worth whatever the people standing around it can later prove.

I laid the page on the coffee table, next to the red folder, and wrote on the sixteenth with a single line through it.

Above it I printed: the fifteenth, after dinner.

"Even sooner," Joan said. "Good girl."

I did not look up.

Under the last paragraph I wrote in my court print, one sentence to a line.

Joan Dahlberg and Kendall Channing each state below that Nolan Dahlberg is the father of Kendall's child.

I signed my name under it and dated it.

Then I held the page out to my mother-in-law.

She read it twice.

I watched her decide that I was a woman who wanted to be told she was right.

"If that's what it takes," she said. "With pleasure."

She signed in her big looping hand and pressed the paper flat with her palm.

"Kendall."

Kendall had not moved from the stove.

"Joan, I haven't had a chance to talk to my doctor about..."

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