Anna, I’m so sorry. I lost my temper. I never meant for any of this to hurt you. I’ll fix everything. Please tell me where you are.
I didn’t answer.
At 7:50 on Monday morning, I stopped in the break room at Lakeview Medical Center to tell my charge nurse, Priya Nair, that I needed the day.
She looked at what I was wearing.
“Three days in a row,” she said quietly.
“I noticed on Saturday and I didn’t want to ask.”
“Priya—”
“Come with me.”
She led me to the supply closet, unlocked a cabinet, and handed me two folded sets of scrubs in my size.
“Staff donations,” she said.
“I always keep a few for the nurses who forget they’re human.”
That was all she said.
I carried those scrubs out to the car as if they were made of glass.
Judith Abbott’s office smelled of lemon furniture polish and old paper.
She was a trim woman in her sixties with silver hair and half-moon glasses, and she shook my hand with both of hers.
“Mrs. Keller,” she said.
“I have waited a very long time to meet you.”
Beside her sat a woman in a navy blazer with a notebook open on her knee.
“Detective Janet Ostrowski,” she said.
“Des Moines Police, financial cr*mes.”
Judith slid a folder across the desk.
It was fat and tabbed with colored flags.
“Your grandmother was a careful woman,” she said.
“She left you two hundred and thirty-one thousand dollars and her house on Linden Street in Ames.”
“The house,” I said.
“Nick told me it had been sold.”
“It hasn’t,” Judith said.
“It’s been rented to a young couple since January, and the rent is in the trust account.”
She opened the folder.
