Margaret picked up the deed.
“Ruth never told us this.”
“She didn’t want Richard interfering.”
Richard’s head snapped toward me.
“Interfering with what?”
I held his gaze.
“With her decision.”
His jaw tightened.
I remembered the last private conversation I had with Grandmother Ruth before the sale.
She had sounded tired, but not confused.
Richard had been pushing her to place Maple Ridge into a trust he controlled.
He talked about simplifying things, protecting the family, planning for the future.
Ruth heard something else beneath those words.
Control.
She called me because she knew I managed properties and because, unlike Richard, I had never asked her for the house.
She wanted Maple Ridge placed somewhere he couldn’t quietly take it over.
Bluebird became that place.
The sale was completed.
Ruth stayed in her home.
Richard kept acting like the mansion was already his inheritance.
Then Ruth died.
And Richard’s family remained.
Under a lease.
A lease they barely read.
I removed another set of papers from the blue folder.
Richard’s eyes followed my hand.
That was when I knew he remembered.
After Ruth’s death, paperwork had arrived regarding their continued occupancy.
Richard had treated it like an administrative nuisance.
He signed where he was told to sign.
Margaret did the same.
They had assumed some distant corporate owner had purchased the property as an investment and was happy to keep respectable tenants in place.
They were partly right.
They were tenants.
They had simply never considered who their landlord might be.
I placed the lease on the table.
Margaret stared at her signature.
“This can’t mean what you’re implying.”
“It means exactly what it says.”
Bree looked at Richard.
“Dad?”
He ignored her.
Instead, he pointed at me.
“You manipulated an elderly woman.”
The accusation came so quickly that it almost impressed me.
Ten minutes earlier I had been the unambitious niece who answered phones for landlords.
Now, apparently, I was a criminal mastermind.
“No,” I said.
“Ruth made a decision you didn’t like.
Those are different things.”
“She was vulnerable.”
“She was clear enough to recognize that you were pressuring her.”
A few relatives lowered their eyes.
That interested me.
Until that moment, I hadn’t known how many people were aware that Richard had been trying to control Maple Ridge before Ruth’s death.
His sister, Aunt Diane, shifted in her chair.
