Meanwhile, my own people were losing faith. My mom drove up from Lexington and told me I had to fight this. My best friend Shannon called every night saying the same thing—get a lawyer, get a shark.
So I hired Lyra Schmidt—a German American woman in her mid-fifties with silver-streaked hair and the kind of calm, precise energy that made you feel like everything might be okay. She’d handled estate disputes for twenty years. She reviewed Carla’s filings in forty minutes and told me the loan had no partnership agreement, no formal terms, nothing giving Carla equity. The will was clean.
“We fight, we win, and Carla goes home with nothing but a lesson in contract law,” Lyra said.
I told her I needed a few days to think.
That night, after Tessa was asleep, I drove to Joel’s office. The building was dark except for exit signs glowing green in the stairwell. I unlocked his private office with the spare key I’d always kept on my keychain and sat at his desk. It still smelled like him—coffee and that sandalwood aftershave he’d used since college.
