Chapter 5 - What Mom Told Claire
Ortiz ordered Mallory and Grant out of the waiting room. Grant objected until a uniformed officer stepped toward him.
"This isn't over," he told me.
"I know," I said. "That's what scares me."
Just before dawn, Dr. Patel returned. Claire had survived surgery. They had relieved the pressure and removed the bleeding they could reach. She was in intensive care, heavily sedated.
"The next forty-eight hours matter," the surgeon said. "We need to watch for swelling and seizures."
I should have felt relief. Instead I felt a small, exhausted hope that I was afraid to touch.
In the ICU, Claire looked smaller than she had on our wedding day, when she'd laughed because I couldn't stop crying. Tubes ran past her pillow. A monitor counted the beats of her heart.
"I signed for the operation," I whispered. "You always handled the hard paperwork. I did my best."
She didn't answer.
At nine, a gray-haired woman introduced herself as Nora Bell, my mother's attorney. She carried a folder that had been bent from being gripped too tightly.
"Your mother asked me to contact you after the funeral," she said. "I wish I were here for a different reason."
"Did she leave Mallory the cross?"
"No. She gave it to Claire for safekeeping."
"Why?"
Nora glanced through the ICU window and lowered her voice.
"Evelyn believed Mallory and Grant had forged documents to sell the family property. She was collecting proof."
I stared at her. Our mother had lived in that old white house for forty-two years. Its orchard was where Emma learned to chase fireflies.
"She would have told me."
"She tried," Nora said. "But she was worried you'd confront Mallory before she could secure the records."
My phone buzzed again. This time it was a photograph of a real-estate sign planted in Mom's front yard.
UNDER CONTRACT.
May you like
Nora looked at the screen and went white.
"Ethan," she said, "your mother never agreed to sell that house."
