Chương 1
"Tabitha Cole kicked the terracotta planter hard enough to split it against the stone path.
Soil burst across Paige Everett’s knees and peppered the white roses she had been pruning. A wet clump struck the cream flowers on her dress, just below the dark gardening apron stained from a morning spent kneeling in the beds. Before Paige could rise, two flattened moving boxes slapped against her shins.
Tabitha pointed toward the mansion with one red-tipped finger. Her off-shoulder dress looked designed for a cocktail bar rather than a funeral-week garden, and her black heels seemed impossible on the uneven stones. Pearls rested at her throat without moving.
“Start packing—your brother already helped us steal tomorrow.”
Paige froze for half a second.
The metal pruning shears remained steady in her hand. She heard the small click of the spring opening them again, the rustle of disturbed leaves, and her own breath dragging shallowly through her nose.
Tabitha stepped closer, crushing two fallen petals beneath one heel.
Paige rose without hurrying. At five foot ten, she stood taller than Tabitha even while barefoot inside old gardening clogs. She brushed nothing from her dress. Her long brown hair had slipped over one shoulder, and a strand clung to the corner of her mouth.
“What did Kyle help you do?”
Tabitha’s smile tightened. It did not disappear. She had spent years learning how to keep a smile in place after the feeling beneath it had changed.
“He explained how confused your father became before he signed.”
Paige’s fingers closed around the shears until the metal handles pressed crescents into her palm. She lowered them beside her thigh instead of lifting them.
Tabitha leaned closer. Paige could smell her perfume over the damp soil.
“Tomorrow Calvin gets the house,” she said. “And these pathetic roses come out first.”
“You just confessed before anyone read the will.”
For the first time, something moved behind Tabitha’s expression. It was not remorse. It was calculation interrupted by fear.
Then her mouth curved again.
“No one reads wills, Paige. That’s something people do in movies.”
She turned toward the garden gate, heels striking the stones with hard, measured taps. Paige watched until the red dress passed beneath the arch of climbing ivy. Only then did she place the pruning shears on the broken rim of the planter and reach into the pocket of her apron for her phone.
Penelope Hart answered on the second ring.
Paige had called her Ms. Penelope since she was fourteen, when the attorney had started coming to Everett House with leather folders and peppermint candies she never ate herself.
“Ms. Penelope, Tabitha mentioned Kyle, my father’s condition, and a signature.”
There was a pause long enough for Paige to hear the faint turn of paper at the other end.
“Touch nothing,” Penelope said. Her voice remained calm, but each word arrived harder than the one before it. “Your father expected this.”
Paige looked down.
Sunlight had reached beneath the rose bush where Tabitha’s kick had torn loose a shallow root. Something pale lay under the wet mulch. Paige crouched without touching it.
A damp envelope had been sealed inside a transparent sleeve. Soil clung to the plastic, but the ink beneath remained visible.
Her name was written across the front.
Not printed. Not typed.
Paige.
The P leaned too far forward. The final e had the open loop her father had never managed to close, even when signing checks worth more than most people’s homes.
Her hand began to tremble.
“Ms. Penelope.”
“What do you see?”
“A letter.”
Another pause.
“Whose handwriting?”
“My father’s.”
Penelope exhaled once. “Paige… that letter is the trap.”
At the gate, Tabitha stopped.
Paige could see only part of her through the roses, one hand gripping the iron latch. Tabitha did not turn around. She stood there for two seconds, perhaps listening, perhaps deciding whether she had heard enough to become afraid.
Then she left.
Paige stayed crouched beside the torn roots, looking at her father’s handwriting and trying not to hear his voice.
Thomas Everett had been dead for eleven days.
The house had already begun learning how to exist without him. The grandfather clock lost seven minutes because no one remembered to wind it properly. The downstairs television remained tuned to a baseball channel he had watched without sound. Three pairs of his reading glasses sat where he had left them: one in the library, one beside the breakfast-room saltshaker, and one inside the refrigerator next to a jar of mustard.
Paige had found that last pair the morning after his death. She had laughed before she cried, which made her feel disloyal in two directions at once.
Now she stood and backed away from the letter.
She photographed the disturbed rose bed, the broken planter, the moving boxes, Tabitha’s heel marks, and the envelope beneath the roots. She included a wide image of the garden so no one could later say the envelope had been found somewhere else.
Then she placed the phone on the stone bench and waited while Penelope drove across town.
The roses had belonged to Paige’s mother first. Margaret Everett had planted fourteen bushes after moving into the mansion, one for every window on the south side. Thomas had complained that white flowers showed every brown edge. Margaret told him that was why she liked them.
After Margaret died, Thomas paid gardeners to keep the bushes alive but never stepped among them. He called them her roses even when speaking to people who had never met her.
Paige had taken over their care after returning from Chicago fourteen months earlier. At first she pruned too aggressively. Thomas stood at the library window and criticized every cut through the glass, tapping his cane as if Paige could hear him.
She could not, but she knew what he was saying.
Too short.
Wrong angle.
May you like
Leave that cane alone.
By the end of summer, he had stopped correcting her. She had mistaken the silence for approval until she understood he was losing words faster than he was losing opinions.
