Chapter 1: The Contradictory Wills

Part 1

**A decade after leaving, I came home to mourn my father — only for my brother to try and convince me I was losing my mind.**

I came home after a decade to mourn my father.

Within weeks, my own brother was trying to convince me I was losing my mind.

I’d just flown back to Maine, exhausted but ready to support my mother and sort through Dad’s affairs.

My brother, Mark, was already here, handling everything.

He told me the will had some “unusual clauses” I’d forgotten about, requiring the immediate sale of our family’s beloved coastal property.

When I insisted I remembered Dad’s clear wishes to preserve it, Mark began subtly undermining my memory, making me doubt everything.

He smiled as he suggested I might still be jet-lagged, or perhaps grief was clouding my judgment too much to understand legal documents.

He didn’t know I would soon find someone who believed me.

The coastal property, a weathered shingle house perched on the cliffs, was Dad’s pride.

It was our childhood.

I remembered his words clearly, spoken countless times over summer bonfires.

“This land stays in the family. Always.”

Yet, Mark kept circling back to the “unavoidable sale.”

He brought it up during breakfast, over Dad’s old blueprints, even during a quiet moment in the living room as Mom dozed.

“Sarah, you’re just not thinking clearly,” he’d say, his voice a concerned murmur.

“The legal documents are explicit.”

“But Dad loved this place, Mark,” I’d argued, my own voice trembling with frustration.

“He would never have wanted it sold.”

Mark simply shook his head.

His eyes held a pitying look.

“Grief does strange things to memory, sis.”

“It makes us remember what we *want* to believe, not what truly happened.”

A cold knot tightened in my stomach.

Was he right?

Had I misremembered Dad’s intentions?

The thought was almost as painful as losing Dad himself.

But something deep inside rebelled.

My father was meticulous.

He was a man of his word.

I spent the next few days in a haze, helping Mom, but my mind kept circling back to Mark’s words.

I avoided him.

I found myself rummaging through Dad’s old study.

It was exactly as he’d left it – organized chaos of nautical charts, old books, and stacks of papers.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.

Then, tucked away in the back of a dusty filing cabinet, under a pile of tax returns from 2008, I found it.

A heavy cream envelope.

It was addressed to “My Dearest Sarah and Mark.”

Inside, folded neatly, was a handwritten page, dated six months before Dad’s death.

It was clearly an addendum to the original will, meticulously penned in his familiar, looping script.

My heart pounded.

The first line confirmed everything I knew.

“This beloved property, known as Ocean’s Embrace, shall under no circumstances be sold, but shall remain a shared legacy for my children and their descendants.”

My hands shook as I read it again.

And again.

Relief washed over me, quickly followed by a burning anger.

Mark was lying.

He wasn’t mistaken; he was actively deceiving me.

I stormed out of the study, the crumpled paper clutched in my hand.

Mark was in the kitchen, casually making coffee, a newspaper spread open on the island.

He looked up, a placid smile on his face.

“Everything alright, Sarah?”

“No, Mark,” I said, my voice dangerously low.

I slapped the addendum onto the countertop between us.

“This. This is what’s not alright.”

He picked up the paper, his eyes scanning the familiar handwriting.

His smile didn’t falter, not even a twitch.

He simply raised an eyebrow.

“Ah, yes. Dad’s little notes.”

“Little notes?” I scoffed.

“This is an explicit instruction! It says the property is *never* to be sold.”

Mark placed the paper back down, his gaze steady, almost unnervingly so.

“Sarah, I understand why you’re upset.”

“But this isn’t binding.”

“Not binding?” I felt a surge of disbelief.

“It’s in his own hand! Dated!”

He chuckled softly, a sound that grated on my nerves.

“Dad often had… emotional bursts, darling. Especially towards the end.”

“He’d write things down, then change his mind.”

“No,” I insisted, shaking my head vehemently.

“He wouldn’t. Not about this. You’re twisting his words.”

Mark sighed, a performance of weary patience.

He walked over to a briefcase he always kept near the back door.

He unlatched it, pulled out a stack of documents, and selected one.

He returned to the island.

He held out a thick, official-looking document.

It was titled “CODICIL TO LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.”

My eyes scanned the header.

It was dated a month *after* Dad’s handwritten addendum.

And then I saw the content.

It explicitly revoked any prior instruction regarding the coastal property.

It granted Mark full power to oversee its immediate sale.

The document bore Dad’s signature.

And beneath it, a notary’s official seal.

Brenda Davies.

My eyes darted between the two papers.

My father’s familiar handwriting, resolute and clear.

And this stark, printed legal document, formal and undeniable.

I had never seen this codicil before.

Never.

A cold, creeping dread washed over me.

My father had gone against his own sacred word.

Or had he?

My mind spun, trying to reconcile the two realities.

One was a betrayal I couldn’t comprehend.

The other, a terrifying thought that my own grip on reality was slipping.

I stared at the two conflicting documents, a creeping dread washing over me, wondering if my own father had truly gone against his word, or if my mind was breaking.

Part 2

The two conflicting documents lay on the counter.

My mind refused to process them.

I left the kitchen, retreating to Dad’s study.

I needed to find something, anything, that made sense.

My gaze drifted to a dusty old chest near his desk.

Inside, beneath a stack of old sketchbooks, was a small wooden box.

I opened it.

Tubes of paint lay nestled within.

Not just any paint, but his special, obscure brand of luminous watercolors.

I remembered him talking about them once.

“Only for a true junior artist,” he’d said, “Someone with real spark.”

That night, while Mom sipped her chamomile tea, I brought it up.

“Mom, do you remember Dad ever giving his art supplies to anyone?”

Her eyes, usually distant, sparked with a flicker of recognition.

“Oh, the boy at the gallery,” she murmured.

“Your father was helping him with his supplies recently, wasn’t he?”

Her voice trailed off.

Her gaze became vague again.

She reached for her teacup, her brow furrowed in concentration.

“The boy… I can’t quite recall his name.”

A forgotten image of a nervous young man, perhaps a gallery assistant, flickered at the edge of my memory.

A new, unsettling link formed in my mind about a potential third party.