“Who?” My voice came out flat.
“Just tell me who.”
“Frank wanted you to read it in his words,” Miriam said.
“He wrote it all down.
He said you deserved to hear it the way he meant to say it.”
“Miriam.” I looked at her directly.
“I just left my father’s deathbed to drive to a house I’ve never seen, and you’ve told me my mother wasn’t my mother and my father hid a first wife from me my entire life.
I need you to say the name.”
She held my gaze for a long moment.
Then she said it.
“Gerald Marsh.”
The room didn’t tilt this time.
It went completely still.
Gerald Marsh was my mother Susan’s older brother.
My uncle.
The man who had sat at every Christmas table, every birthday, every family gathering I could remember.
The man who had pressed fifty-dollar bills into my hand at graduations and called me his favorite niece and danced with me at my wedding.
