The photograph was of me. Taken the previous morning at Juniper and Rye. Beige apron, hair twisted up, shoulders carrying the particular exhaustion that accumulates during the hours between four in the morning and whenever the breakfast rush finally relents. I was wiping down a table in the front window, and I looked exactly like what my parents needed me to look like.
I had made sure of it.
“Exhibit C,” Baxter announced to the gallery. “Your Honor, this is the beneficiary of a three-million-dollar estate in her natural habitat. While my clients have spent decades navigating real estate portfolios, investment trusts, and complex asset management, their daughter has been mastering the art of the coffee refill.” He paused for the laugh. It came. “There is no shame in honest labor, naturally. But the question before this court is whether the late Eleanor Voss intended to place the bulk of her life’s work in the hands of someone whose most sophisticated professional judgment involves remembering whether table seven ordered the diet cola.”
The room gave him what he wanted.
I stood still and let them have it.
Underneath the cheap wood of the defendant’s chair pressing into the backs of my legs, I could feel the recorder in my blazer pocket, the raised metal button warm against my thumb. I pressed it. A faint vibration answered me. No sound, no light, nothing anyone in that room would have noticed if they had been paying attention to anything other than their own amusement. Just the beginning of the end, small and silent and already in motion.
