The dirt was still cool from the morning dew when Misty’s shadow fell across my hands.
“Start packing!” was the first thing my ex’s new bride said when she arrived at my dad’s house after his recent burial.
“You should start packing your bags right away, because the moment they read that will tomorrow, this entire estate is going to be ours.”
Misty’s voice cut through the air above the white rosebushes before I even had a chance to look up from my work. Her expensive heels sank deep into the damp soil of my father’s garden as if she were strutting down a runway instead of treading on the ground where he had spent half his life. I remember thinking, absurdly, that those heels would leave marks in the soil that would take days to smooth over, and that my father would have hated that more than almost anything else she’d said.
I continued to snip the dry branches with my pruning shears, moving slowly and carefully just as he had taught me when I was a little girl, standing beside him in this same spot with my hands wrapped around handles too big for my ten-year-old fingers. He always told me to work without a trembling hand but to never cause unnecessary harm to the plant. Every dead branch had to be removed at the right angle, close to the joint, so the wound would heal clean instead of festering. He’d made me practice on the same three bushes for a whole summer before he trusted me near the others.
He had planted these specific rosebushes on the day I married Simon, telling me that white was the color of clean beginnings. He’d dug the holes himself that morning, in his good shirt, sweat soaking through by the time the caterers arrived for the reception, refusing to let anyone else do it because, he said, some things a father had to plant with his own hands. Looking back at it now, the irony was almost unbearable as they stood there witnessing the end of my twelve-year marriage, the same white petals that had once decorated my wedding table now trembling in a garden that had become, in the space of three weeks, a battlefield.
The flowers remained steadfast even after my ex-husband had left me for his assistant, the very woman who now stood before me smelling of perfume and radiating arrogance, as though grief were something that happened to other, lesser people, people who hadn’t already secured their next best thing.
“Good morning, Misty,” I said quietly, refusing to give her the satisfaction of a direct look.
She flashed that fake, sugary smile she always used when she intended to humiliate someone with a whisper.
“Harrison’s will is being read tomorrow morning, and Simon and I think it would be best if we talked like adults before things get uncomfortable.”
I wiped my dirt-stained hands on my gardening apron and stood up to my full height. I was several inches taller than her, even with her wearing those ridiculous designer heels, the kind that were never meant to touch soil, only marble lobbies and other people’s expensive floors.
“There is absolutely nothing for us to talk about, as this is my father’s house.”
“It is actually your father’s estate,” she corrected me, savoring every syllable of the word the way some people savor a good meal. “Simon was like a son to him for a very long time, so the least we can expect is to receive what is rightfully ours.”
I felt the heavy weight of the metal scissors in my grip and felt a surge of cold anger, the kind that doesn’t show on your face but settles somewhere behind your ribs and stays there.
“Are you talking about the same Simon who cheated on his wife with his own secretary?” I asked in a low, steady voice.
“Oh, please, all of that is in the past now,” she said while waving her hand as if she were shooing away a pesky fly, something small and beneath her notice. “Harrison forgave him, and they continued to go to the country club together every Sunday right until the very end.”
The end had come far too quickly for all of us.
It had only been three weeks since we laid my father to rest after a brutal eight-month battle with cancer. I still remembered the way his hands had grown thinner every week, the way he’d started asking me, near the end, to describe the garden to him because he could no longer walk out to see it himself. I would sit beside his hospital bed and tell him which roses had opened that morning, which ones needed pruning, and he would close his eyes and listen as though I were reading him poetry. I didn’t have enough time to tell him everything I wanted to, or to ask why my brother, Jesse, had pulled away from me to cling to Simon instead, showing up at the hospital less and less as the months wore on, always with some excuse about work, always leaving early, always somehow managing to be gone whenever the harder conversations needed having.
“My father didn’t leave Simon a single cent,” I stated firmly, knowing that my dad was many things, but he was never a fool.
For a brief moment, the confident smile on Misty’s face began to falter, just a flicker, there and gone so fast I might have imagined it if I hadn’t been watching for it.
“We will see about that tomorrow, especially since Jesse doesn’t seem to agree with your assessment.”
A sudden chill ran down my spine at the mention of my brother’s involvement.
“Have you been speaking with my brother behind my back?”
She took a step closer to me and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial hiss, the kind of voice people use when they want you to know they’re enjoying themselves.
“Let’s just say he has helped me understand your father’s true mental state during those final months.”
I gripped my shears so tightly that my knuckles turned white and my fingers began to ache. My dad always said that roses should be treated firmly but never cruelly, because even the sharpest thorns have a purpose.
“Get off my property, Misty,” I told her, “before I forget how to be polite to a guest.”
She let out a short, dry chuckle that grated on my nerves, a sound with no warmth in it at all.
“Your property? How sweet of you to think that you can keep this fortune all for yourself while the rest of us just sit back and watch.”
“My father built every inch of this house and planted every tree with his own hands, so this isn’t just about money to me.”
“Wake up, because everything in this world is about money,” she snapped back at me. “Tomorrow you are going to learn that lesson the hard way.”
She turned to leave, but before she passed through the garden gate, she delivered one final, cruel blow, tossing it over her shoulder the way you’d toss out trash without bothering to look where it landed.
“You really should start packing, because Simon and I are going to remodel the second we move in. We are going to start by ripping out these old-fashioned rosebushes since everything here needs a more modern look.”
Her heels clicked away down the stone path until she disappeared from sight. I looked down at the white flowers and realized I had accidentally crushed several delicate petals with my muddy hand, the white turning brown at the edges where my fingers had pressed too hard.
I stood there for a long moment after she was gone, listening to her car doors slam somewhere beyond the hedge, the engine turning over, the gravel crunching under tires as she drove away. Then I sat down on the low stone bench my father used to sit on when his knees got bad in his last few years, and I let myself cry for exactly two minutes, no more, because that was all I could afford before Brenda needed a clear voice on the phone.
I pulled out my phone and dialed a number I knew by heart.
“Attorney Brenda, it’s me,” I said the moment she picked up the call. “Misty just came here to threaten me.”
Her professional tone shifted instantly to one of deep concern.
“What exactly did she say to you, Cassandra?”
“She said exactly what we were afraid of, so I need to know if you can come over right now.”
“I am on my way,” she replied firmly, “and you shouldn’t worry because your father thought much further ahead than any of them.”
After I hung up, I noticed something caught under the leaves of a rosebush, half-buried where the wind must have blown it during the last rain. It was a small envelope, damp with the morning dew and covered in my father’s unmistakable handwriting, the same careful, slanted script he’d used on every birthday card he’d ever given me.
It was addressed directly to me, and I picked it up with trembling hands. I felt as if the paper weighed more than it should, as if it held a final, decisive move in a game I didn’t know we were playing. I turned it over twice before I let myself really look at it, half afraid that if I opened it too quickly, whatever was inside would slip away from me, the way so much else had slipped away in the last three weeks.
I didn’t open it right there in the garden. Some instinct told me I needed steadier ground first, and a witness, someone who had known my father as long as I had and could tell me if what I was about to read was real or some cruel trick of grief playing itself out in my hands.
Attorney Brenda arrived twenty minutes later carrying her briefcase and a bottle of wine, her car pulling up the same gravel drive Misty’s had just left. She had been my father’s legal counsel for decades, but she was also a dear friend who had known me since I was a child, the kind of friend who had sat through my ballet recitals and my father’s fortieth birthday party and, eventually, the quiet, difficult months of his illness.
We locked ourselves in the study, which still smelled of the mild tobacco and old wood that always reminded me of my father, the leather of his reading chair worn soft in the shape of him, the shelves of books he’d collected over forty years, everything exactly as he’d left it because I hadn’t been able to bring myself to touch any of it yet. I sat in his large leather armchair while still clutching the unopened envelope in my hand.
“You didn’t want to open that alone, did you?” Brenda asked gently, setting her briefcase down and pouring two glasses of wine neither of us would finish.
I shook my head because I was terrified of what Misty had hinted about my brother Jesse, terrified that whatever was in this envelope would confirm the thing I’d been trying not to believe for the past eight months — that my own brother had chosen Simon and Misty over me, over our father, over the family we used to be before all of this began.
“Your father left very specific instructions, and some things were meant to be discovered only at the right time.”
I looked up at her with confusion.
“What do you mean, the right time? Brenda, what did he tell you?”
She sat down across from me, folding her hands in her lap the careful way she did when she was choosing her words for a courtroom rather than a conversation between old friends.
“I mean that your father spent the last two months of his life rewriting parts of his estate plan. I visited him three times in that period, always when Jesse and Simon believed he was resting. He was very deliberate about who knew what, and when.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”