Chapter 2

After half an hour, I draped the urn with the length of cloth Mom had loved most while she was alive.

By the custom back home, the ashes had to sit in the house for a day before they could be taken to the cemetery the next morning.

I was carrying the urn back to the foot of his mother's old walk-up when it happened.

Nigel's voice rang out:

"Geraldine Henson!"

I turned around.

It looked like Nigel had been waiting there a long time for me.

He got out of the car and stormed up to me, seething.

The moment he reached me, he shouted his complaint:

"What exactly is your problem?"

"You won't pay the utility bills, you won't come home to do the housework. You've completely washed your hands of this household, is that it?"

Hearing that, all I felt was how absurd it was.

I looked at him and asked, word by word:

"I won't pay the utilities, so you can't?"

"I won't do the housework, so you can't? Do you not have hands?"

"Oh, no, that's right. Your hands are reserved for doing housework at your brother's widow's place."

"Your time is reserved for staying up all night planning her travel itineraries."

Caught out, Nigel's face shifted, but he recovered fast and shouted at me, self-righteous as ever:

"Geraldine Henson, do you have a shred of conscience?"

"My brother is dead. His widow is all alone with no one to lean on, and she's raising a daughter on her own."

"Her life is so hard. If even I won't help her, how is she supposed to get by?"

I'd heard this reasoning at least ten times.

Every time before, I'd chosen to forgive it.

But now, with the heavy urn in my arms.

The reasoning only struck me as ridiculous.

I didn't want to argue with him anymore, and shook my head.

"Since you've got it all so well reasoned out, since you think she's all alone with no one to lean on, then go ahead and help her."

I finished and started to leave.

Nigel threw out his hand to block me:

"I told you, the utility bills at the house still haven't been paid!"

I said coldly:

"Pay them yourself. Open Venmo, tap the bill pay section. Do I have to teach you that too?"

"I…" Nigel's brow knotted, and he said, a little guiltily: "I, my account's empty. Transfer me some."

So he was broke, and that was why he'd come looking for me on purpose.

I asked:

"That book of yours sold well in the first half of the year. Didn't you put away fifty thousand?"

Nigel gritted his teeth and said:

"I did have fifty thousand, but didn't she want to take our niece traveling?"

I said:

"What does that have to do with your book advance?"

Nigel lowered his voice:

"She's a woman on her own with our niece to raise. Where would she get money? I paid for their trip."

I couldn't believe it.

Nigel was such a tightfisted man.

Normally, if I bought myself an iced latte, he'd call it a waste, say I didn't know how to run a household.

If I bought a dress over a hundred dollars, he'd say I was throwing money away, that a thirty-dollar one would do just fine.

If I went to a movie, he could nag about it for half a day.

And now he'd handed over fifty thousand all at once.

Not for anything big. Just to send his brother's widow on a trip!