— CHAPTER 2: NINE YEARS OF SUNDAYS —
Two years ago, my dad had said: "Gloria understands me in a way I forgot was possible."
We'd been on the back porch. He was drinking sweet tea. I'd laughed and said something like Dad, don't be weird about the housekeeper, and he'd gone quiet in that way he had — that particular stillness that meant he'd decided to stop trying to explain something to you.
Derek wanted to contest the will immediately. He had a lawyer on the phone before we'd even left the parking lot.
"Undue influence," he kept saying. "Nine years alone in that house with her, she manipulated him—"
Beth went cold and calculated. I found her pulling out file drawers in Dad's study that same afternoon.
I went to find Gloria instead.
She lived in the small cottage at the back of Dad's property. She opened the door and she wasn't what I expected — sixty, maybe. Steady eyes. The kind of face that had seen a lot and decided to keep showing up anyway. She looked sad, not guilty.
"I figured one of you would come," she said. "Do you want to come in?"
We sat at her small kitchen table and she said: "I know what your brother thinks. I need you to know I didn't ask for any of this. I told him not to do it."
"Then why did he?"
"Because he felt he owed me."
"Four million dollars' worth?"
She looked at me steadily. "He thought so."
"Why? Gloria. Why did my father think he owed you four million dollars?"
May you like
She was quiet for a long moment.
"Because of what happened to my daughter," she said. "And because of who put her there."
