PART 3
They were there by eight-forty.
Bradford, Pamela, and Curtis, in two cars, with a lawyer in a third, on the gravel drive of Hollowmere the morning after their father’s wedding, and I opened the door in a bathrobe because I’d decided on the stairs that if I was going to be the woman they thought I was, I’d at least be comfortable.
“Where’s my father?” Bradford said.
“Sleeping. He was up late. It was his wedding.”
Pamela looked at the bathrobe.
“You’re in his house.”
“I’m in my house. I’m his wife. It’s a legal category — Curtis, you’re a realtor, you know the word.”
The lawyer stepped forward with a folder.
“Mrs. —” he checked the folder “— Mrs. Hollis. My clients have filed for emergency conservatorship of their father’s estate on the grounds of diminished capacity. A marriage entered into under those conditions is subject to annulment. I’d advise you not to unpack.”
I looked at the folder.
Then I did the thing Rick had taught me in the greenhouse, which is that you don’t answer a question that’s actually a threat.
You ask one back.
“Which doctor?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The capacity evaluation. Which doctor signed it? Because Rick took a cognitive exam yesterday morning, at nine, at the county medical office, with two witnesses, and passed it, and it’s in Mr. Sato’s file with the marriage license. So if your doctor examined him after that, I’d like to know when, because he was with me the rest of the day. And if your doctor examined him before that, I’d like to know why the exam he passed doesn’t count.”
The lawyer looked at Bradford.
Bradford looked at Pamela.
Pamela, in a Cartier bracelet at eight-forty in the morning, said the thing that told me everything.
“Dr. Whitlow didn’t need to examine him. He reviewed the records.”
“He reviewed the records,” I said. “From a hospital where Rick has never been a patient, or from the one where he has?”
Silence on the gravel.
“I’ll tell Rick you stopped by,” I said. “He’ll be up around ten. He likes to be in the greenhouse by eleven. If you’d like to see him, that’s where he’ll be — not in a courtroom. And if you’d like to talk to me, I’ll be with him, because that’s what I’m for.”
I closed the door.
Then I sat down on the stairs in my bathrobe and shook for a full minute, because I’d never in my life closed a door on anyone who had more power than I did, and it turned out you could.
Mr. Sato came at noon.
Sixty, quiet, thirty years Rick’s lawyer, and he laid out on the dining room table a file that was, he said, “the most organized thing a dy*ng man has ever handed me.”
Cognitive exams — three, since May, all passed.
A video, made in June, of Rick reading his own will aloud, in his own words, to a camera, with the date on the newspaper beside him.
The marriage license, with the judge’s notation.
Violet’s trust, ironclad, revised in July to make me its protector — “not beneficiary,” Sato said, “protector; she gets nothing but the job of making sure Violet gets everything.”
And a letter.
Sealed.
To Violet.
“To be delivered when Marnie decides she’s ready to hear it,” Sato said. “His words. He said you’d know when.”
I didn’t know when.
But I put it in the drawer in the greenhouse where he kept the seed packets, and I knew where it was.
Sato stayed for coffee.
He’d known Rick thirty years, and he wanted, I think, to look at the woman his client had bet the estate on, and I let him look.
“He interviewed you,” Sato said, finally. “You know that.”
“Interviewed?”
“For a year. Every Sunday dinner, every Saturday in that greenhouse — he was watching how you treated people who couldn’t do anything for you. Violet. The housekeeper. Him, before you knew he was worth anything.” Sato turned his cup. “He called me in March, before the diagnosis, and said, ‘I’ve found someone who talks to me at dinner like I’m a person. I want to know who she is.’ I ran a background check. Bookkeeper, no debt, no family, no record, one friendship she’d followed across a state. He read it and said, ‘That’s a woman who stays.'”
“He asked me to marry him in August.”
“He decided in March,” Sato said. “The diagnosis just made it urgent. I want you to understand the order, Mrs. Hollis, because his children are going to tell a court you were a last-minute shield. You weren’t. You were the plan before there was a reason for one.”
I sat with that.
A man had been watching me talk to a rock at a table for a year, deciding whether I was the kind of person who’d stay.
Then he’d gotten six months, and needed one.
