Two days later I drove over to her place with the revised terms printed out, two-eighty and the repair reserve spelled out in plain language, and I brought one more thing I hadn't told her I was bringing: a line I'd added myself, in the margin, about the sale representing a full settling of accounts between us. I thought it was generous. I thought it was the kind of thing a decent man offered at the end of something long.
Inez read the whole page standing in her kitchen doorway, not inviting me past the mat, and when she got to the margin note her mouth went flat in a way I recognized from sixteen years of watching her decide something before she said it.
"What's this," she said, pointing at it without looking up.
"It means we're square," I said. "The sale, the note, all of it — it closes out 2008 too. We don't carry it forward."
"You want me to sign a piece of paper agreeing the past is settled."
"I want us both to be able to put it down."
"That's not yours to offer," she said, her voice quiet but edged. "You didn't steal my eleven thousand dollars. Celia Dacre did that. But you stood at the potting bench and told me she was solid, and I trusted you. Yes, I told you to withdraw the wing listing. Selling my job wasn't going to help me. I know why you stopped it." She held the page out between us. "What I don't know is when that became permission to stop looking for another way. You never brought me another deadline, another plan. I kept working, then paying rent, and you kept telling me what you couldn't do." She tapped the margin. "Now you've found something we might both manage, and you've put this on it. If I refuse to call us square, do I lose the price? That's what you've made me ask before I can even consider buying."
I wanted to argue the wing. I wanted to explain the heating loop again, the job it would have cost her, as if the explanation erased the postponement. Instead I stood on her step in the cold and let her finish, because I understood, somewhere under the wanting to defend myself, that this was the part I'd been avoiding since 2008.
"You're right," I said. "I didn't make her do what she did. But I did point you toward her, and I did put my own survival ahead of my promise to you, more than once, and no number on this page undoes that just because I've decided it should."
Inez's shoulders came down half an inch, not forgiveness exactly, just the release of bracing for a fight that wasn't going to happen. "Then take the line out," she said. "I'll buy your greenhouse. I won't buy your absolution. Those are two different purchases and I'm only interested in one of them."
I crossed it out right there on her kitchen step, the pen dragging slow through the paper, and handed it back to her clean. "Just the sale," I said.
"Just the sale," she agreed, and for the first time since Nolan had rolled his offer across my gravel lot, the thing between us felt like it might actually be simple.