The rest took two hours. My father made coffee. We sat at the kitchen table, the one with the scratch in it from the time I knocked over a pot when I was eight, and he talked. He talked about my mother, about the lunch counter, about the six years they had together. He talked about the will, and the brother who had come out of nowhere to claim the house, and the signature that did not match, and the lawyer who was a friend of the family and did nothing. He talked about the way Karin had gone to the other relatives one by one and told a version of the story in which Elena was unstable and greedy and cruel, and about how Elena had stopped being invited to things, how the phone had gone quiet, how a family can be taken apart by one determined person with a decent story.
"You could have fough
