Chapter 2 - The Door I Didn't Use
Nora wanted to call the sheriff immediately. I wanted to, too, but fear kept making me count the ways the story could be twisted. Caleb would say I had slipped. Stacey would say I was confused. The petition they had filed would make every word I spoke sound like a symptom.
"Then we start with facts," Nora said. She took photographs of my soaked clothes, the scrape on my forearm, and the muddy marks where I'd dragged myself from the pond. She wrote down the time: 8:42 p.m. She made me repeat what I had heard until the sentence sat on paper in my own handwriting.
At dawn, she drove me to urgent care. The nurse checked my breathing, my shoulder, and the bruises blooming along my hip. When she asked if I felt safe at home, I said no. The answer seemed to surprise me more than her.
"Dad said you fell out of your chair," she said. "Stacey told him not to make a big deal out of it."
Wren looked at her hands. "No. I saw them come back from the dock. Dad was shaking. Stacey wasn't."
She had something else: a manila folder Caleb had left on the kitchen counter two weeks earlier. Inside were papers giving him authority to manage my trust, sell the lake property, and approve medical decisions if I was declared unable to care for myself. The attached petition claimed I had become forgetful, paranoid, and dangerous.
"I didn't sign these," I said.
My lawyer, Mara Ellis, answered on the first ring. When I told her about the pond, she went silent for three seconds.
"Eleanor, don't go near your house. Don't speak to Caleb or Stacey alone. And do not let them know you have those papers."
May you like
"Because the emergency guardianship hearing is scheduled for Monday morning. If they convince the judge you're unstable before we show the forgery, they may get control of everything."
Then Mara added, "There's one more thing. The petition was filed a month ago. Somebody planned this long before last night."
