After I spent two weeks nursing my daughter through her first newborn, her husband handed me a $640 bill for sleeping in the guest room.

The door shut behind Diane. Nobody moved.

Then Megan turned to her husband.

"What is Kestrel?"

Travis's face had gone still — not calm-still, the other kind. The stillness of a man deciding very fast how much to say.

"It's nothing."

"Your mother just walked out of my house and told mine to ask you about Kestrel." Megan's voice was flat and even. "That is not nothing."

"It's a work thing. It doesn't concern —"

"Travis."

He looked at her. Then at me. Then back at her.

"It's an LLC," he said finally. "I set it up about eighteen months ago."

"For what?"

He pulled out a chair and sat, spreading his hands flat on the table like he was trying to keep it from moving.

"I was going to tell you. I was waiting for the right time."

"Tell me what?"

"I've been picking up side work. Renovation jobs, mostly small stuff. I set up the LLC so I could invoice clients properly and keep it separate from my paycheck." He paused. "It runs through its own bank account."

Megan stared at him.

"How long?"

"Eighteen months."

"And you never said a word."

"I was going to use it to pay my mother back. That was the whole plan — build it up quietly, hand her one lump sum, then tell you it was done. So you'd never have to carry it."

"How much is in the account?"

Travis's jaw worked.

"Megan —"

"How much, Travis?"

"Fourteen thousand."

The number sat down in the middle of the room like it had a body.

Megan lowered herself into a chair.

"You've got fourteen thousand dollars in an account I didn't know existed," she said. "While I've been lying awake over money for two years. While I was nursing a newborn on no sleep. While my mother was on her knees scrubbing your bathroom and you were billing her six hundred and forty dollars for the privilege."

"I was going to —"

"You were going to tell me." Her voice didn't rise. It dropped. "When?"

Travis didn't answer.

I'd stayed out of it up to now. I leaned in.

"Travis. Does your mother know about that account?"

He looked at me.

"Yes."

"Did she know before today?"

A beat.

"Yes."

"So when she offered you the twenty-three thousand," I said slowly, "she already knew you had a second income she could point to. She knew the loan could be paid back. She just decided not to say so."

Travis's eyes went to the table.

"She said it should stay between us," he said. "Family business."

"No," I said. "She wanted it to stay hanging over Megan's head."

He didn't argue.

Megan got up and stood at the counter with her back to us for a moment. When she turned around, her face was dry. Whatever she was feeling had moved somewhere deeper down.

"I want to see the account," she said. "Today. Every statement. And then we are going to sit down and figure out what happens to this marriage." She looked at him steadily. "All of it, Travis. Nothing separate. No more waiting for the right time."

Travis took his phone out of his back pocket and set it on the table. He opened the banking app and pushed it across to her.

Megan looked at the screen for a long moment. Then she looked at me.

"Mom," she said quietly. "I think I need you to stay."

I didn't hesitate.

"I'm not going anywhere."

But as I said it, my own phone buzzed against the table. A text. From a number I didn't know.

You should know what Eleanor isn't telling you either. Ask her about the will.

Megan saw my face shift.

"Mom? What is it?"

I turned the phone face-down.

"Nothing," I said.

But my hands weren't steady. Because there was a will. And there was something in it I had never told my daughter — something I'd kept to myself for six years, for reasons that had felt right every time I chose not to speak.

Somebody knew.