After fees—enough.
A few weeks later, Dex visited alone.
He sat at my kitchen table without meeting my eyes.
“Petra has been researching assisted-living communities,” he said.
“Why?”
He swallowed.
“Just in case the house becomes too much for you.”
I was seventy-one years old, healthy, independent, and still maintaining the property Harold and I had built together.
So I said nothing.
The next morning, I called Josephine Ray, the attorney who had handled Harold’s estate.
For weeks, I gathered every email, every suspicious question, and every document Petra had asked me to sign.
Then Josephine prepared one final folder.
Now it rested beneath my chair.
When Petra finally stopped speaking, I reached down and lifted it onto the table.
Dex looked up.
Petra’s confidence disappeared.
I placed one copy in front of her father.
Then I looked straight at her.
“This house is not your inheritance.”
Her father opened the folder.
Petra suddenly lunged toward it.
And before anyone could read the first page, Dex whispered, “Mom… what did you find?”
My hand remained on the folder.
Petra’s fingers stopped an inch above the papers. For the first time that evening, the calm expression she had practiced in the mirror broke apart.
“Don’t touch that,” I said.
She pulled back as if the folder had burned her.
Her father, Martin, lowered his eyes to the first page. His face changed before he finished reading the heading.
“What is this?” he asked.
“An accounting,” I said. “Of every request Petra made, every document she brought into this house, and every conversation she believed no one else heard.”
Petra gave a short, humorless laugh.
