Margaret parked behind Mark’s truck.
She did not knock.
The front door was unlocked, and she walked into the warm, lamplit foyer where Emily had staged her life with the precision of a gallery curator. Every surface clean. Every color coordinated. Not a single object out of place, which told Margaret more about what lived beneath this house than any mess ever could.
They were in the living room.
Mark stood near the fireplace. His face was the color of old paper. His hands were in his pockets, and his shoulders carried the particular collapse of a man who had been caught between two women and chosen the wrong one, and knew it, and did not know how to unchoose.
Emily sat on the arm of the sofa, legs crossed, chin lifted. She wore a cream-colored cashmere sweater and no makeup, her auburn hair pulled back in a way that said she had prepared for this. She had probably been coaching Mark for the last thirty minutes, giving him scripts, telling him what tone to use, which words would work. She had always been like that — not cruel in the obvious way, but architecturally cruel, building situations that made other people’s reasonable anger look like insanity.
“Margaret.” Emily smiled. Not wide. Just enough. “I’m glad you came. We should talk about this.”
Margaret did not sit.
She looked at Mark.
“Did you give Emily’s parents permission to use my cabin?”
Mark opened his mouth. Closed it.
“Mark.”
“I didn’t — it wasn’t like that. Emily mentioned they needed a place to stay for a few weeks, and I said—”
“You said yes.”
He swallowed. “I said they could use it. I didn’t think—”
“You didn’t think.”
Emily shifted. “Margaret, before this becomes something it doesn’t need to be—”
“I’m speaking to my son.”
The words landed like a slap. Emily’s smile held, but something behind her eyes recalculated.
Mark rubbed the back of his neck. “Mom, the cabin sits empty most of the time. You’re up there maybe a few weeks a year. It seemed—”
“Seemed what? Reasonable? To give away something that isn’t yours?”
“I didn’t give it away. I just said they could—”
“You gave away the key. You gave away the privacy. You gave away my space, my property, and apparently my wine.” She paused. “And you did it without asking me.”
Emily stood. “Margaret, I think you’re overreacting.”
Margaret turned to her.
“Overreacting.”
“Yes. It’s a cabin. It’s a building. People are more important than—”
“Don’t.” Margaret’s voice dropped. “Don’t tell me what’s important in my life.”
Emily blinked. For a half-second, something shifted in her expression — not fear exactly, but the sudden awareness that the person she had been managing was not, in fact, manageable.
Mark stepped forward. “Mom, I’m sorry. I should have asked you. That was wrong.”
