“…you know what I mean,” Mr. Goldberg said, getting his keys. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it wasn’t for sale. Until now, I suppose. I mean, it’s been empty for more than a quarter of a century.”

He unlocked the car and we both got in.

“You aren’t seriously thinking about that preposterous offer, are you?”

“Well, it will be nice to have more cash for the project, but I need to speak to my father about this.”

“You bet you do,” Mr. Goldberg said, starting the engine. “Say hello to him from me and be sure to let me know the outcome of that conversation.”

I couldn’t have that conversation with my dad because he passed away from some cold virus complications three days later. I had been going through the details of the proposal and postponing the talk to make sure I could present it correctly to him. I had missed a few calls from my mother and not bothered calling her back. I didn’t want to make any mistakes and miss any details, which was something I had been known for. When I thought I was ready, I had called my mother the day before and told her about my plans to visit them. My dad had been unwell for some time and couldn’t join the conversation, but my mother sounded happy and excited about seeing me. When she called me the next day to break the news, I’d thought she was merely wanting me to bring her the Turkish treats she liked and so didn’t bother to answer my phone. She always asked me to do that. When I saw that she’d tried to call me three times in a row, I picked up my phone.

No treats this time. Just a black suit.

“It happened so fast, Alex. He was doing better. He was excited about your visit and then he just stopped breathing while he was asleep last night. The doctor said it was some sort of a respiratory syndrome, a lung failure.”

She started to sob quietly. I was considering ways to console my mother, but all I could think about was the fact that my dad’s ancestors had all been buried in the family cemetery situated in one of the park’s corners, and he was probably going to be buried there as well. The corner wasn’t in the deal I was working on, but the idea of my dad’s headstone overlooking the house that wasn’t going to be ours anymore made me feel even sadder.

My father, Alexander Montague I, was the only child of Theodore and Adelaide Montague. He received a good education in the places where the children from upper class usually went to, worked with the tenants in the estate to make sure that everyone was happy, kept the income coming and started to develop some investment projects. He wasn’t susceptible to the charms of the local female candidates among the “equals” but was known as a desirable match for many. Before he was given the reins to Maple Grove House, he was sent to Europe to learn about art, for which he hadn’t shown any propensity but had been expected to understand well to help increase the family’s art collection. My grandfather had wanted him to know the difference between Manet and Monet and to be able to hang the right paintings in the right places in the house to impress guests. Not that the family had acquired a big art collection, but it was “an essential element of a good house” and Theodore had thought it was important. That was the trip on which my father met a young and beautiful French woman, Elizabeth Baudelaire-Nazarova, who spoke good English and who, a year later, would become his wife and, a year after that, my mother. He met her at a Roerich exhibition in Paris, while admiring Himalaya’s landscapes and the artist’s unusual choices of colors. He asked her if she liked the paintings, which he hadn’t really understood but kept that fact to himself.