Dan opened the door with a wide smile, one hand still holding the television remote, completely at ease.
“Maureen! Come in, come in.” He pulled me into a hug before I could say a word. “I’ve been meaning to call you. Heard the good news about Will and his lovely lady. You must be over the moon, huh? When’s the wedding?”
I let him talk. I stepped inside, sat down at his kitchen table, and set my hands flat on the surface.
He registered something was off mid-sentence and let the question trail away.
“What’s wrong?” he said, pulling out the chair across from me.
He registered something was off.
“I need to ask you something, and I need you to be honest with me, Dan.”
“Okay.” He settled in, still relaxed, still performing casually. “What’s going on?”
“Mom’s necklace,” I probed. “The green stone pendant she wore her whole life. The one she asked me to bury with her.”
He blinked. “What about it?”
“Will’s fiancée was wearing it.”
Something moved behind his eyes. He leaned back and crossed his arms. “That’s not possible. You buried it.”
“I thought I did,” I said. “So tell me how it ended up in someone else’s hands.”
“That’s not possible. You buried it.”
“Maureen, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Her father told me he bought it from a business partner 25 years ago,” I explained. “For $25,000. The man told him it was a generational lucky charm.” I kept my eyes on his face. “He told me the man’s name.”
“Wait,” Dan was stunned. “Claire’s father?”
“Yes.”
Dan said nothing. He pressed his lips together and looked at the table, and in that moment he looked less like my 50-something brother and more like the teenager who used to get caught doing things he knew better than to do.
“He told me the man’s name.”
“It was just going into the ground, Maureen,” he said finally, his voice dropping. “Mom was going to bury it. It would’ve been gone forever.”
“What did you do, Dan?”
“I went into Mom’s room the night before her funeral and swapped it with a replica,” he confessed. “I overheard her asking you to bury it with her. I couldn’t believe she wanted it in the ground.”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “I had the necklace appraised. They told me what it was worth, and I thought… it was being wasted. That at least one of us should get something from it.”
“Mom never asked you what she’d want,” I retorted. “She asked me.”
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