Later, I would learn that Brad did indeed get nothing other than the gifts his second wife had given him. The car, some clothes, his expensive watch. He could visit the baby for twenty-four hours each week, but after a month of living with his parents in Orleans, he moved to Brooklyn to start over and find joy there, I guess.
Meanwhile, I’d taken an advisory position two days a week at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for the summer, overseeing their nurse-midwife training. Wanda had recommended me, and it would be extra money. The drive was long, but I listened to audiobooks and tried not to flip off too many fellow Masshole drivers. And . . . well, it got me off-Cape and opened the world a little more for me, and I didn’t think that was a bad thing. It would be a little less time with Dylan, but it would help pay off my debt, too.
Except one day, when I checked on how much I still owed, I found the balance was zero. I drove to Seamen’s Bank immediately, still in my scrubs. “Something happened with my mortgage,” I said. “It’s listed as nothing, but I owe at least three hundred grand.”
The bank manager, Mark, looked me up. “Oh, yes,” he said. “That was paid off. Not by you, I’m guessing?”
“No! I don’t . . . Not by me.”
He clicked on the keyboard. “Well, it is paid off.”
“Does it say by whom?”
More clicks. “I’m afraid it doesn’t. A money order was sent in with no return address.”
“So some rich person just swooped in and paid off my mortgage?” I asked.
“It appears so.”
“I . . . That doesn’t seem legal. How would someone else know what I owed?”
“Well, what’s really private these days? Someone knew your account number and that we held your mortgage. It’s legal.” He smiled. “Congratulations.”
I went home in a state of utter confusion. Dad didn’t have the money. Neither did Ben, plus he had a daughter in med school. If he had extra money, he’d give it to her, as he should. Hannah? Possibly, but I couldn’t imagine her doing that without asking me first. I did have my pride, after all. Too much of it, probably.
Melissa? She was the only one I knew with that much money. If it was Melissa, I couldn’t take it for many reasons, not the least of which was I’d been her midwife. But even at her richest, I still couldn’t imagine her just giving away three hundred grand and change.
But my mortgage was paid off.
It couldn’t have been Brad. The Fairchilds, in a fit of guilt? Hell, they hadn’t given us much when I was in the family, let alone now. It wasn’t their style. A family vacation, sure. College tuition? That was the parents’ job.
I grilled my father and Hannah, then Wanda to see if we had, I don’t know, a millionaire drug-dealing patient who needed to unload some cash. I asked Dylan if his grandparents had said anything about money lately. They had not. Chase Freeman, out of guilt? But he’d just declared bankruptcy, having lost his job more than a year ago, according to Beth.
For now, it would remain a mystery.
Dylan came home for the summer, and it was wonderful. He went to meet his baby sister, pronounced her “durable” and said she was pretty cute. Because even though his father had ditched both his kids, my son, my wonderful boy, would never turn his back on his family. He was a Silva, after all, no matter what his last name was.
Then, one day en route back from the hospital, I stopped in Orleans to hit up the gorgeous produce at Friends’ Marketplace, since I was making dinner for my parents, Hannah, Dylan and Ben. I meandered through the aisle, sniffing tomatoes and fondling eggplants, then rounded the corner and jolted to a stop.
There was my former mother-in-law.
“Lillie!” she cried. “Oh, Lillie, how are you?” She came in to hug me, and I stepped back behind my cart, avoiding her arms. “Oh,” she said, her expression crashing to the floor.
I just looked at her. She had aged, finally—her face had suddenly realized it was well past seventy and had dropped an inch in the last year. She looked . . . tired.
“Well, of course you’re entitled to be angry,” she said. “Of course you are.” I still said nothing. “We’re closing the Cape office of Fairchild Properties, did you know? And we sold our house here. It just . . . It didn’t seem . . . anyway. You look wonderful, Lillie.”
I searched my heart for something to say and came up empty. If she had been the mysterious benefactor, she could tell me. Even if she had been—which I doubted—it wouldn’t undo the past year.