Chapter 3
I looked at her. I held her eyes for three seconds. Then I looked down at my phone and then back at her.
She opened her mouth.
She did not speak.
She turned and followed her family down the jet bridge.
I stood in the terminal until the door closed. Then I walked to the exit and sat in my car in the parking structure with the engine off and the cheap sunglasses on my lap and my phone in my hand, and I opened my father's contact in my address book, which I had never deleted, which I never would delete, and I thought about the last conversation I had with him in the hospice room six weeks before he died. He had been very precise about things he wanted me to understand. Love generously, Amelia, he had said. But never hand anyone the keys to your life.
I had thought he meant money.
I called my attorney.
Margaret Reed had been my attorney and my father's attorney for twenty-two years, and she answered on the second ring because she always answered on the second ring, and I told her what I had seen and what I had heard and what was sitting unsigned on the corner of the desk in the study of the Beacon Hill brownstone that I had come to think of as ours and that I now understood had always been mine.
She was silent for one second. Then her voice changed to the register it went to when she had made a decision. "Do not let them know you know," she said.
"I won't."
"Don't sign anything. Don't move anything. Don't change anything visible. If they're positioning to transfer assets, I need to see the documents before they know you've seen them, and we need every transaction they've made in the last eighteen months pulled and reviewed before they can panic and cover it."
"What do I do tonight?"
"Go home. Open the safe your father left you. Call me from there."
May you like
I drove home to the brownstone on Beacon Hill. The house smelled of white lilies, my favorite, which Ethan had arranged to be delivered every Thursday with a standing order he had set up three years ago as a gesture I had always found romantic and now understood was the architecture of a performance. The wedding portrait hung above the fireplace, the one from the ceremony in the Hartwell family garden where everyone had smiled in the June light and I had believed I understood what my life was becoming.
I went upstairs to the study.
