The Envelope
“Sit down, Margaret,” Mr. Grant said. “Please. Before you open this.”
I didn’t sit. I’d spent two years learning to read Walter’s lawyer’s face, and I didn’t like what I saw on it now.
Between us, on the polished table of his office, sat a cream envelope sealed with a disk of red wax. My name was written across the front in handwriting I would have known anywhere.
Walter’s handwriting.
Walter had been dead for eight days.
“Is this about the estate?” I asked. “Because I already told his children — they can have the money, the furniture, the cars, all of it. I never married him for any of that.”
“All three of them have filed suit to void your marriage,” he said. “They’re claiming their father was incompetent when he married you. That you manipulated a dying man.”
I almost laughed. “He beat me at chess three nights before he died.”
