Page 57 of Steadfast

We were quiet for a few moments.

“I’ve been making some lists,” she said, breaking the silence. “Things that we need to do. First, I need to call the hospitals and find out where they took your mom. We can’t just leave her body unclaimed.” Her voice broke on the last word, and my eyes watered. “I’ll take care of all those details. Your dad wascremated, so I thought we should do that for her.” She looked at me questioningly.

“That’s fine with me.”

“Okay, so I’ll do all that. You don’t need to worry about it.”

“Thank you.” I wouldn’t have even known where to start.

“For her funeral—”

I let out a painful chirp of laughter. “A funeral for who? Us? We’re not going back there. Her friends? I guess you could put up a flyer at all the local bars.”

“Maybe do something here?” she asked softly. “Just us? Trust me, even if you think you don’t need it—the kids deserve a day to say goodbye. We could spread her ashes.”

“Yeah,” I conceded. “Something here. That works.”

“Okay,” she said, writing something on her list. “What about the house? Do you know if your parents had a will?”

“I have no idea. I don’t even know how she paid for it. She hasn’t worked in years.”

Aunt Ashley looked up at me in surprise. “Your dad.”

“What?”

“When your dad passed away he had a massive insurance policy, Aoife. That’s probably what you guys have been living on.”

I let out a huff of disbelief.“What?”

“I figured you knew,” she replied, shocked. “There has to be some left. We’ll have to get that figured out. If your mom was smart, she just paid off the house in full—” She went back to writing in her notebook.

“Wait, back up,” I demanded. “You’re telling me that my dad had a huge insurance policy?”

“I think it was close to a million dollars,” she replied with a nod.

I wanted to throw something. Hit something. Scream at the top of my lungs. It didn’t make any sense. I’d been scrimping andsaving just to buy the kids school supplies, and the entire time we’d had a million fucking dollars? How was that possible?

“If she was smart, she would’ve paid off the house first—”

I lifted my hand to stop her from speaking, still reeling. I just needed a minute to wrap my head around it.

“Your dad was a planner,” Aunt Ashley said softly. “He wouldn’t have wanted you guys to struggle if something happened to him.”

“Then he shouldn’t have had kids with such a selfish bitch,” I spat without thinking. “Oh, mygod.”

“There has to be some left,” Aunt Ashley said, ignoring my outburst. “We need to figure that out, too. It would come to you kids with your mom gone.”

“I don’t know, she was never short on cash for booze and God knows what else,” I argued. “She probably blew through it.”

“We’ll check.”

I nodded, but I had a feeling that money was gone. Why else would she have been stealing cash out of my wallet?

“We’ll go from there,” Aunt Ashley said, tapping her pen against the paper again. “If your parents had a will then they would’ve made me your godparent. That was always the plan when you were little, if anything happened to them. Your dad had a sister back in Ireland—Saoirse was named after her—but from what I understand, her husband was a creep, so they hadn’t spoken in years.”

“If you’re named godparent in their will, then that’s it, right?” I said, my stomach clenching. “The state wouldn’t have anything to say.”

“I think so,” she said. “The way you guys took off might’ve caused some shit—”

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