Chapter 15: What Yuna Kept

Yuna had not expected the inheritance game to change her. She had come to the estate as a forensic accountant hired by a solicitor, expecting an eccentric puzzle and a legal complication and perhaps a moderately interesting week in Scotland. She had received all three. She had also received six people she had not expected to find indispensable and a cold case that had reached into the present with both hands and changed the direction of things. She called her mother on the train back to London. 'You sound different,' her mother said. 'I am different,' Yuna said. 'I think.' 'What happened?' Yuna thought about how to explain an eccentric Scottish estate and a forty-year conspiracy and a woman who had kept photographs in a safe deposit box in Galway for four decades and an eighty-three-year-old man who had been waiting for someone to ask. 'I worked on something that mattered,' she said finally. 'The work I usually do matters in a technical sense — it's accurate, it's useful, it contributes to the function of things. But this mattered in a different way. I could see who it was for.' 'The people who were wronged,' her mother said. 'Yes. And the one who kept the evidence. And the one who carried the guilt. And the charities. And the land.' She looked out the train window at the Scottish countryside moving past. 'A lot of people over a lot of years, all waiting for a piece of it to be returned.' Her mother was quiet for a moment. 'Will you do more of it?' she asked. 'This kind of work?' Yuna hadn't thought about this yet, which surprised her given that she thought about most things before they happened. 'Yes,' she said. 'I think so.' A pause. 'Bea's organization does this work. She's asked if I'd consult.' 'And will you?' Yuna looked at the countryside and thought about a drawing room in Scotland and six strangers who had become something she didn't have a word for yet. 'Yes,' she said. 'I will.'