Sign the papers, Eleanor, or you’ll be sleeping in your car by Sunday. This

Brandon laughed and repeated it, louder this time, playing to the cousins gathered by the staircase. Tessa added that I had “thirty days to vacate, out of kindness.” I nodded once, then walked to the mahogany sideboard where Richard kept his good bourbon and pulled out a slim leather folder I had placed there that morning. Inside were three documents. The first was Richard’s updated trust, signed and notarized fourteen months ago at Day Pitney in Hartford, naming me sole trustee of the estate, the Nantucket cottage, and the controlling shares of Halden Mills — the textile company Brandon believed he was about to inherit. The second was a letter, in Richard’s own handwriting, instructing me to keep Brandon on payroll “only so long as he behaves like the man I hoped he’d become.” The third was a resignation form, already filled out with Brandon’s name, dated today. I slid it across the console toward him. “You have until the lilies wilt,” I said softly, “to sign this, or I exercise clause nine and remove you from the board on Monday morning.” Tessa’s phone slipped out of her hand and cracked on the marble. Brandon’s face went the color of the wallpaper. The cousins, who had been silent, suddenly remembered they loved me very much. I picked up the casserole again and carried it to the kitchen, because grief is one thing, but disrespect — disrespect has paperwork. Later, as the last guests filed out, Brandon tried to apologize at the door. I handed him a single white lily from the arrangement and told him his father had asked me to give it to him, but only if he earned it. He hadn’t. I closed the door, locked it, and finally — for the first time all day — I cried. Not from sadness. From the strange, quiet relief of being seen exactly as Richard had always seen me.