Chapter 5: Diane Arrives
She came two days later.
I was in my apartment when the buzzer rang.
I wasn't surprised.
Mr.
Aldren had warned me she'd been asking for my address through the hospital's volunteer office.
They hadn't given it to her.
She'd found it anyway.
I pressed the intercom.
"Yes?"
"This is Diane Mercer-Holt." The voice was the same one from the phone — sharp, controlled, the kind of voice that expected doors to open before it finished speaking.
"I'd like to talk."
I let her up.
She was in her mid-forties, well-dressed, with the kind of posture that came from a lifetime of being the most important person in the room.
She looked around my apartment once — the small kitchen, the secondhand sofa, the stack of books on the floor — and I watched her recalibrate.
She thought this would be easy.
"I'll keep this short," she said, not sitting down.
"My father was not well when he made those changes to his will.
Whatever he told you, whatever he gave you, he wasn't in a position to make those decisions.
You took advantage of a sick old man."
"I sat with him," I said.
"I held his hand.
I didn't ask him for anything."
"You married him."
"He asked me to."
"He was dying and confused and alone and you exploited that."
"He was alone," I said, "because you didn't come."
Her jaw tightened.
"You don't know anything about our family."
"I know he was in that hospital for four months.
I know the distance from your house in Connecticut to that hospital is two hours and forty minutes by car.
I looked it up."
Something shifted in her face.
Not guilt.
Recalculation.
"I'm prepared to offer you a settlement," she said.
"Fifty thousand dollars.
You sign a document releasing all claims to the estate, and this is finished.
You walk away with more money than you'd make in two years."
"No."
She blinked.
"Excuse me?"
"No.
I won't sign anything."
"Then we go to court." Her voice dropped, harder now.
"And in court, we have a physician who will testify that my father showed signs of cognitive impairment in the months before he d!ed.
We have records.
We have a pattern.
You will spend money you don't have fighting a case you cannot win, and at the end of it you will have nothing."
I looked at her for a long moment.
"Diane," I said, "did your father ever tell you what he did before he retired?"
She frowned.
"He ran a manufacturing company."
"Before that."
She said nothing.
"He was a corporate attorney," I said.
"For twenty-two years.
Estate litigation was his specialty." I picked up the green backpack from beside the sofa and set it on the table between us.
"He kept very careful records.
The kind a twenty-two-year attorney knows will hold up."
The color in her face changed.
"I'd like you to leave now," I said.
She left.
But at the door she stopped, one hand on the frame, and turned back.
"You think you know what you have," she said.
"You don't know half of it.
And when Connor gets here, he won't be as polite as I was."
The door closed.
I stood in the quiet of my apartment and thought about what she'd just told me without meaning to.
May you like
There was more.
Whatever was in that notebook — there was still more she was afraid of.
