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Even though she had been on these roads many times, Miranda drove carefully. She knew the dangers: sharp turns, leaping deer, drunk teenagers. She came into the small town nearest what she now thought of as her true home. Passed the Fishing Hole diner. The golf course and club. The outfitter and guide shop. The craft store that sold delicate watercolor landscapes set in rugged frames and rough furniture finely crafted from birch trees. The gift shop that sold linens and trinkets printed and shaped in the guise of moose and bears but made in China. She found her own driveway in the deepening dark and listened as her tires rolled up the half mile of gravel—a driveway that would be impossible without Dix, or someone like him, to handle the winter plowing and the spring repair. It occurred to Miranda that the driveway had been the most important part of the property to her father. He valued it because it created privacy. Privacy from exactly what he never said. Privacy was simply a thing in and of itself to be coveted. Like success.

Whatever that was, she thought, with a bitterness that was new to her.

The house glowed gently from a lamp lit somewhere deep within the rooms. She grabbed the boxes of mail, closed the car door with her hip, and tiptoed to the back door—she didn’t want to wake her mother. She fumbled with the door, her arms overladen, and managed to squeeze in without dropping anything. She flinched as the screen door banged behind her. She slipped into the kitchen, where the light above the stove was on—as she’d left it. She set the boxes on the counter and listened. Nothing. She figured her mother must be asleep. Miranda went back to the car two more times to get her things, each time quieter and more careful than the last. She listened again. Still silent. She flicked on a light and filled a kettle with water. She returned to the counter. Something different, out of place, in the living room beyond caught her eye. What she saw took her breath away.

There was a person on the sofa, at once strange and familiar. Her expression was blank and ghostly; her hair was sticking out in all directions like an unpruned shrub; her cheeks were hollow in the dim light. She was wearing a faded robe that hung limply from wasted shoulders, slippers broken down in the heels on her feet. It was her mother. Yes, just her mother. Terrifying in that moment of unrecognition.

My God,
Miranda thought.
Has it gotten this bad? Has she gotten this bad?

“Mummy?” she said, trying to keep the fear from her voice. “Are you OK?”

Her mother’s eyes shifted in Miranda’s direction but remained empty. Slowly, dim recognition began to fill them. Her mouth turned up in an expression that might be a smile but appeared more as a grimace.

“Miranda,” she whispered. As if the young woman in front of her were an alien or a marvel, not simply her daughter.

“Mummy, I was in Connecticut. I was at our house. Remember? Remember our house in Connecticut?”

Her mother nodded, slowly, almost imperceptibly.

“I brought back some things. Some important things.”

Her mother’s head continued to bob. Encouraged, Miranda brought a stack of letters and cards over to the sofa and set them in her lap.

“Look. Cards and letters from friends, Mummy. From your friends. Remember all the friends you used to have? Down in Connecticut?”

Her mother looked from the mail to her daughter, her expression blank.

“Mum, there’s a bunch of other stuff here, too. Stuff we need to go through. Stuff we need to figure out. Financial stuff. Legal stuff. I’m going to need your help.”

Miranda was desperate to connect with the woman at her side. She scanned her face for comprehension of any kind. Her mother stared at Miranda for a few moments, then stood and allowed the envelopes to fall from her lap like dead leaves from a tree. She clutched her robe under her chin with one hand and shuffled away, back to her bedroom, without a word. The kettle screamed from the stove.

The next morning, Miranda called Richard Stone and left a noncommittal message with his secretary, saying she wouldn’t be able to make their meeting, but she’d be in touch. Then she began to open the large manila envelopes she’d left on the table the previous night, prying open the flaps cautiously, as if there was danger inside. She found statements with long columns of numbers, various investment accounts, letters from lawyers about actions and cases and depositions, requests for signatures, direction, next steps. She had no idea what to do with any of it, about any of it. She tried calling a few of the numbers on the cover letters. She got voice mailboxes. She stumbled out some staccato story about trying to take care of her deceased father’s affairs. She finally reached a woman who told her they could only speak to the surviving spouse. Miranda looked out the window as the woman spoke and saw the surviving spouse in question. In a sudden frenzy of ill-advised activity, still in her bathrobe, holding a mug of coffee in one hand and a pruning shears in the other, the surviving spouse was ineffectively hacking at a shrub, her face screwed up in frustration, tears glistening on her cheeks. Miranda hung up the phone and started crying, too.

Then, into the frame of Miranda’s watery vision walked Dix. He took the tool from her mother’s hand and gently, carefully, showed her what branches to clip. Miranda watched as he pulled at a twig, pointed to the exact spot to snip, used a finger to demonstrate the angle, and then handed the clippers back to her mother. She seemed to be paying close attention, but the burst of effort must have worn her out. She snipped a few twigs, then dropped the shears where she stood and wandered away. Dix followed her, keeping a respectful and watchful distance. Like a well-trained sheepdog, he herded her gently toward the house, through the front door, and in the direction of the hallway that led to her room.

As he returned, Miranda cleared her throat. Dix came and stood over her shoulder. He made a quick survey of the piles of paperwork spread across the dining room table. Miranda wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand.

“Looks like you need a lawyer,” he said.

“It seems I already have several of them,” Miranda replied.

“Well, your father had quite a few, that’s clear,” Dix said. “But I think you need a lawyer to help you with all his lawyers.”

Miranda nodded. Dix took up a pen, wrote a name and number on the back of one of the manila envelopes, and then, before leaving her side, let his large, gnarled hand rest over her small, delicate one for just a moment. The feeling—a rough, comforting towel against shower-softened skin—lingered long after he was gone.

Warren Bessette had always lived within, and rarely ventured out of, the heavily treed and sparsely inhabited six-million-acre Adirondack Park, defined by a light-blue outline on maps of New York State. He’d been to Vermont several times. Blurry events to him now—a relative of his wife’s got married, a client wanted to show him some land he intended to purchase, a friend took him fishing. There were also the few days he and Celine had spent wandering around Burlington’s bricked-in streets and driving the nearby back roads between desultory and inconclusive appointments with specialists. All these exposures left a bad taste in his mouth that he couldn’t quite source but suspected had something to do with the stiff superiority so many of the residents of Vermont expressed toward their own state and its inhabitants. He had also spent time in Albany, the capital, first for law school and then much later, when the doctors there finally diagnosed and tried to treat Celine’s rare cancer. He liked Albany—its unapologetic scruffiness, architectural mash-ups, tree-and-row-house-lined neighborhoods nestled up against one another, and the rowdy political chatter of its pubs and coffee shops. He even forgave the place his memories of watching his wife waste away at the hospital because he remembered how carefully and gracefully they had cared for her.

He and Celine were both forty-one when she died, and he had never remarried. He had no desire for companionship other than hers. For a while, various women tried chatting him up at the post office or grocery store, a few came into the office to discuss legal matters and quickly tried to turn the conversation to more personal, social topics, but the grave coolness of his demeanor gave them no toeholds for intimate exchanges. He had grown up with Celine. They didn’t become a couple until their last year of high school, even though her long black hair; pale, freckled skin; and thin red lips that readily broke into a sly smile had always been an indelible presence a couple of rows back in algebra class, a few tables over in the cafeteria, or passing him as she strolled up the aisle in the school bus, her stop two before his. Her slender silhouette stayed by his side as they graduated high school, went through college together at Plattsburgh State, and lived for the years of law school on a busy Albany street, in a tiny apartment that smelled of garlic and basil from the Italian restaurant below. They then returned to the mountains, where he opened his practice. Her lithesome grace was so soothing to him, even in memory, that all the doors to intimacy she had nudged open were available only to her. He had enough closeness with her—he felt the residues would last him the rest of his life.

Warren’s law practice focused on the passages of life. Home purchases, divorces, custody issues, wills. It often troubled him that his services were called upon for far too many unhappy occasions. Somehow he had not considered that when he decided to become a “country lawyer,” as the slicker, noisier, more ambitious classmates in law school had called his sort of practice in light mockery. Most of his clients were locals, and he was sometimes paid for his services with a hind of venison or a season of snowplowing, remuneration he valued as much if not more than money, as his needs for cash were few. Sometimes summer people came to him for work on real estate transactions or for local grievances with a neighbor, and on occasion, for work on things they didn’t want their lawyer back home to know about.

Charles “Chick” Steward had requested Warren’s services a few times. First, to buy his land, then to try to buy some adjacent land a neighbor didn’t want to sell, and then to get advice on a dispute with the Adirondack Park Agency. They got along fine during the first transaction, but Chick had not liked the answers Warren had given him on the other matters. He wanted Warren to be more aggressive, to represent him more forcefully, to find a way around laws that were intended to protect the park and respect its “Forever Wild” statute. Chick Steward had always expressed disgust with what he called “that damn blue line.” Warren did not share Chick’s opinions. He was respectful and reverent toward what he felt was an admirable, flexible, progressive, and unique process of managing and preserving public lands while allowing for a range of private enterprise and ownership. He once pointed out that they were fortunate to live in the largest park, protected area, and National Historic Landmark in the continental United States. When Chick responded with a dismissive wave of his hand, Warren stopped engaging him in any sort of personal or professional conversation. After that, the two men were cordial when they ran into each other but didn’t strain for politeness. This was no burden, as they didn’t travel in the same circles. Warren didn’t golf, preferring a glass of warm milk with a splash of maple syrup and a convoluted mystery or dense history book to the greens. Warren also had no interest in representing men who were accustomed to using money to get their way. He had heard rumors of Chick’s shady real estate transactions, his unethical and risky business dealings. Most people had. It was a small valley. Gossip traveled on every gust of wind. Most people also just shrugged it off. They’d come to understand that was the way things were done “downstate,” and in “the city.” Warren had met Bunny Steward once or twice. She was a slender, brittle woman who seemed to be under an invisible and yet constant strain. He couldn’t imagine it was easy being Chick Steward’s wife.

When Dix brought Miranda in to see him, Warren was surprised to find that Chick and Bunny had produced such a lovely, diffident daughter. Miranda seemed so callow, as if she’d never heard a harsh word or suffered a disappointment, even though he knew the last year or so had been full of tragedy. Her hair was honey colored, her eyes faded-denim blue, her build slight but not insubstantial. She was almost beautiful—all that kept her from it was a sense that her features didn’t seem quite reconciled—and she had a gossamer quality to her demeanor that was striking. Warren recognized her as someone who immediately, unknowingly, unintentionally, tapped into a man’s protective instinct.