Chapter 7: What Lisa Did Next
She didn't go home.
Philip's assistant — a young woman named Donna who had arrived with a second leather case and a portable document scanner — found out through a phone call twenty minutes later.
Lisa had gone directly to Gerald Marsh's office.
"They're meeting now," Donna said from the doorway.
Philip didn't look surprised.
"Of course they are." He turned to me.
"She's trying to align their stories before we can move."
"Can she do that?"
"She can try.
But Marsh sent you that message last night.
He's already creating distance between himself and her account of events." Philip set down his pen.
"The question is which version of the truth he decides is safer for him."
Walter had been given breakfast by Nurse Carol — toast and orange juice on a tray — and was eating quietly at the small table by the window.
He had barely spoken since Lisa left.
I watched him tear a corner off his toast and not eat it.
"Walter," I said.
He looked up.
"She's going to be all right," I told him.
"I mean Lisa.
Whatever happens legally — she's not going to prison.
I want you to know that."
He looked at his plate.
"I know."
"Does that bother you?
That she won't face something worse?"
He thought about it seriously, the way he always did.
"She was mean to you," he said.
"She tried to take your house.
She scared me." He picked up his juice.
"But she's still my aunt."
I nodded.
"She is," I said.
"And you're allowed to feel both things at once."
He drank his juice and didn't say anything more.
But his shoulders dropped slightly, and I understood that he had needed permission for exactly that.
Philip's phone rang.
He stepped into the corridor to take it.
He was back in four minutes.
"Marsh," he said simply.
"He wants to cooperate.
He's claiming Lisa presented the documents to him as pre-signed and told him you had executed them before the accident during a period of lucidity.
He says he had no reason to doubt her."
"Is that believable?"
"It's convenient." Philip sat down.
"But it also means he's willing to testify that Lisa told him the signatures were genuine — which directly contradicts any story she might tell about acting in good faith." He paused.
"He's protecting himself.
Which means he's going to hand us Lisa."
Ruth, who had been sitting quietly in the corner, looked up from her notes.
"The hospital will need to file its own report regardless.
An attempt was made to obtain a signature from an incapacitated patient on our premises.
We have an obligation to document that."
"Good," Philip said.
"File it today."
I lay back against the pillow.
The ache behind my ribs was still there — duller now, but present.
The doctor had said it would be another week before I could be discharged.
Another week of hospital food and monitor beeps and the particular stillness of a room that smelled like antiseptic.
But the folder was gone from the nightstand.
And Philip was here.
And Walter was eating toast by the window.
I closed my eyes for a moment.
"Granny."
I opened them.
Walter had turned in his chair to face me.
"When you go home," he said, "can we have pancakes?
You always make them on Saturdays."
Something shifted in my chest — not the ache, something else entirely.
"Yes," I said.
"First Saturday I'm home."
He turned back to the window.
Philip was watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read.
He looked down at his notepad before I could ask him about it.
"There's one more thing," he said.
"I spoke with my colleague in property law this morning.
The deed of transfer — even if we have it invalidated, Lisa may attempt to challenge your existing will on the grounds that you lacked capacity to maintain it."
"Can she do that?"
"She can file.
She won't win — not with your husband's original will, Walter's testimony, and Marsh's cooperation.
But it will take time." He looked at me.
"I want to prepare you for that."
"How much time?"
"Months.
Possibly longer."
I thought about that.
"Philip," I said, "update my will.
Today, if possible.
While I am clearly awake, clearly aware, and clearly of sound mind.
I want it witnessed by Ruth, by Nurse Carol, and by anyone else you need."
He nodded slowly.
"I can have a draft ready this afternoon."
"Good."
The door opened.
It was a different nurse — not Carol, someone I didn't know — and she looked slightly flustered.
"Mrs.
Elaine?
There's a woman downstairs.
She says she's your sister-in-law.
She's asking to come up." The nurse hesitated.
"She says she drove four hours this morning when she heard you were awake.
She's — she's crying in the lobby."
I stared at the ceiling.
My sister-in-law, Dorothy.
My late husband's sister.
I hadn't spoken to her in two years — not since the funeral of a mutual friend had ended in a disagreement I could no longer clearly remember the cause of.
"Send her up," I said.
Walter looked at me.
"I didn't know you had a sister-in-law," he said.
"She was your grandfather's sister," I said.
"She's family."
He considered this.
"Is she nice?"
I thought about Dorothy — loud, opinionated, fiercely loyal, the kind of woman who drove four hours without calling first.
"She's very much herself," I said.
The door opened again five minutes later, and Dorothy walked in with red eyes and a paper bag from a bakery that she held out to me immediately.
"I brought you lemon cake," she said.
"I didn't know what else to do."
I looked at her for a moment.
Then I started to cry.
I hadn't cried once since I woke up — not through the folder, not through Lisa, not through any of it.
But Dorothy standing there with a paper bag of lemon cake undid something that had been holding very tightly.
She sat on the edge of the bed and put her arms around me without saying a word.
Walter watched from his chair by the window.
After a moment, he got up quietly and came to stand beside us.
Dorothy reached out and put one hand on his shoulder without letting go of me.
None of us spoke for a while.
Outside, the hospital carried on its ordinary business.
Somewhere down the corridor, a phone rang and was answered.
A cart wheeled past.
A door opened and closed.
In the room, it was quiet.
May you like
And then Dorothy pulled back and looked at me with her red eyes and said: "Now.
Tell me what that daughter of yours has done."
