I understood now what she meant. Not just the land or the oil or the irrevocable trust or the partnership she had negotiated on my behalf while she was fighting for every breath. She had meant all of it. The whole of what she had spent two years building, quietly, behind closed doors, while I sat beside her hospital bed reading and holding her hand and thinking she was only resting.
She had been working.
Working to make sure that when the moment came — when I stood on the porch of a farmhouse in Osage County with my son in the driveway and everything on the line — I would not be standing alone.
I wasn’t.
I walked to the card table, poured the last of Earl’s coffee into the cup, and sat down. Through the window, the fields went on and on to the horizon under a wide Oklahoma sky.
I had work to a.k do. Legal proceedings, FBI cooperation, Morrison Energy meetings, a tax lien to settle with the extension Helen had filed. Months of it, probably. None of it easy.
But I was standing inside Jenny’s walls, and they were holding.
I love you more than I ever said, she had written. Trust the farm.
I looked at the yellow rose through the window.
“I trust it,” I said.
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