Genevieve Larkspur. My mother. Dead thirteen years.
Beckett had used her name in the second year of the lease because it matched mine on an old insurance record and because he assumed nobody would ever read that far. He needed a second driver covered without a credit check, and Rosalie would not have passed one.
Thaddeus made the call. My son answered laughing. Then he stopped, and the silence on that speaker went on long enough that I noticed the clock above the service desk. He brought the car in at 3:40 with Rosalie in the passenger seat, and neither of them looked at me in the lobby.
The white sedan belonged to a hospice nurse. That is the part I had wrong, loudly, in my own head, for three days. Rosalie’s mother had been dying in their spare room since February. Nobody told me, because telling me meant needing me again, and Rosalie had decided somewhere along the way that needing me was the same as owing me.
