I said nothing.
I held Stella’s small, cold hand and kept my chin up.
Because I believed that by tomorrow, the house would be mine, and my daughter would never be afraid again.
The next day, Chester’s lawyer, Hugh Loring, came to the house.
He was a tall, stooped man in a gray overcoat that smelled of rain.
He sat down at the dining table where Stella had learned to castle her king.
He set his briefcase beside him and did not open it.
“Mrs. Wolcott, I’m sorry. He knew you’d fall for all of this and agree to marry him. But unfortunately, the will leaves you nothing from his estate.”
The room tilted.
The clock on the mantel kept ticking as if nothing had happened.
In the next room, my daughter was laughing, a white chess pawn in her fist.
Hugh Loring did not look sorry.
He looked like a man who had been dreading this moment for five years.
He sighed and continued:
Chapter 2: A Box and a Card
“Mrs. Wolcott,” he said, “I need you to hear the whole sentence before you decide how to feel about it.”
I stared at him.
“I heard it.”
“You heard half of it.”
He turned his hat slowly in his hands.
“Chester wrote those words himself. ‘He knew you’d fall for all of this.’ He told me to say them to you exactly that way, in this room, the day after the fun*ral.”
“Why would anyone ask that?”
“Because by Friday, the whole city will be saying it about you. That you fell for a rich old man. That you played a lonely widower for a house.” His mouth tightened. “Chester wanted you to hear the cruelest version first, in a quiet room, from someone who knew better.”
I laughed.
It was an ugly little sound.
“Then he succeeded. It hurt exactly that much.”
“I know,” Hugh Loring said.
“Is the house mine?”
“I can’t answer that today.”
“Am I supposed to be out by the end of the month?”
“No one can ask you to leave before Friday.”
“What happens on Friday?”
“The will is read. At ten o’clock, at my office on Superior Street. Mr. Vickers has been notified. So has the board of Wolcott-Vickers Marine.” He paused. “So has someone else. Chester wanted a full room. He insisted on it.”
My hands had gone cold on the tablecloth.
“You told me he left me nothing.”
“From his estate,” Loring said carefully. “I chose each of those words, Mrs. Wolcott. So did he.”
He reached into his briefcase at last.
He took out a small wooden box, no bigger than a deck of cards, and slid it across the table.
It was pale pine, worn smooth at the corners.
“He asked me to give you this tonight. Not before. After you had heard the word ‘nothing.'”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was told not to ask.”
Then he stood, and for a moment, the tired old lawyer looked like he might say something more.
He didn’t.
At the door, he turned. “Don’t speak to anyone from the company before Friday. Not even to be polite.”
Then the rain swallowed him.
I had barely cleared his coffee cup when the front bell rang.
Not once.
Three times, the way people ring when they already think the house belongs to them.
