had left his face.
“What does it say?” I asked.
He knelt beside me, the paper shaking in his hand. “The hospital opened an internal investigation after an anonymous complaint.”
“About what?”
His throat worked.
“About unauthorized access to your records. And missing personal effects from the bereavement storage log.”
My mother said, “That proves nothing.”
Oliver looked at her. “It proves enough to start a criminal inquiry.”
She laughed then, a sharp, brittle sound. “A bookstore clerk is giving legal opinions now?”
“I was a paralegal before I worked for Marin,” Oliver said calmly. “And I already called Thomas’s attorney on the way here.”
My mother’s smile disappeared.
Thomas looked at Grant. “Who was the nurse?”
Grant’s eyes filled with tears. “Her name was Dana Kline. I didn’t know her before that night. Celeste did.”
My father turned slowly. “You knew the nurse?”
My mother straightened. “She was the niece of a woman from my garden club. She was worried about Marin’s state of mind.”
“No,” I said. My voice felt scraped raw. “Don’t put this on me.”
The printed still lay on the wet table now, the image blurring at the edges from the rain. That little yellow bundle was not Lena herself. I knew that by the shape. It was the blanket and cap, the small things the nurse had promised would be returned to us after the hospital prepared the keepsake box.
That box had arrived missing the cap.
At the time, I had blamed myself. I had thought I had forgotten. Grief rearranges memory. People tell you that you misplaced things, imagined things, signed things, agreed to things. After a while, you stop trusting the floor beneath your own feet.
My mother had counted on that.
Sloane turned to Grant. “You knew?”
He whispered, “I knew about the records. I didn’t know she was going to use the baby things at lunch.”
“That makes it better?”
“No.” He pressed his hands to his face. “No, it doesn’t.”
My mother seized on his guilt. “Grant did what he did because he understood how unstable Marin had become. Everyone did. She stopped opening the store on time. She refused invitations. She kept a nursery intact for months.”
“That room had her name on the door,” Thomas said.
His voice was so cold that my mother flinched.
“She was our daughter,” he continued. “Not a phase. Not clutter. Not evidence.”
My father stepped away from the doorframe. He looked older than he had an hour before, as if the rain had washed away some expensive illusion and left only a tired man who finally saw the house he had been living in.
“Celeste,” he said. “Did you forge Marin’s signature?”
My mother stared at him. “I protected your estate.”
“Answer me.”
“I protected it from grief.”
“Answer me.”
Her mouth trembled with rage.
“Yes,” she said. “I signed her name.”
Sloane made a small, wounded sound.
My father closed his eyes.
The confession settled over the terrace, heavier than the rain.
Thomas helped me stand. My knees shook, but I did not let go of his arm. Oliver moved to my other side without asking, steady and silent.
My mother looked at me then, really looked at me, and seemed offended by the fact that I was upright.
