Changing the lock meant intention.
Preparation.
Permanence, or at least an attempt at it.
No one changes the lock for a casual family stay.
I stepped back without making a sound.
There was a side gate at the end of the hedge, old cedar with a latch I had installed myself years before. I still had the small skeleton key for that gate on my ring because I distrusted electronic conveniences and had never seen the point of discarding something that still worked. I slipped through the gate into the narrow path between the house and the neighbor’s fence, where the wind was quieter and the damp earth smelled of old leaves.
The kitchen window over the sink was cracked open.
Voices drifted out.
I moved closer and stood just beyond the sightline of the glass, where the porch overhang cast enough shadow to hide me.
Tiffany was in the kitchen. I knew her voice even when she lowered it into that false confidential sweetness.
“I’m telling you,” she said, “once the paperwork is filed, the rest is easy.”
Another woman answered—her mother. “And what if she fights?”
Tiffany laughed.
“Rosalind?” she said. “Please. She folds. Peter says she hates conflict more than anything.”
My hand tightened so hard around my key ring the little metal points bit into my palm.
Her mother made a doubtful sound. “She didn’t look like someone folding yesterday.”
“She left, didn’t she?”
A pause. Cabinet doors opened and closed.
Then Tiffany again, lower now, almost impatient. “By the time she realizes what’s happening, the conservatorship petition will already make her look unstable. Peter has examples. The doctor’s appointment, the confusion with the pharmacy, that time she forgot her charger and drove back to Philly without it. We don’t need much. Just enough to say she’s having memory problems.”
My vision narrowed so suddenly I had to brace one hand against the shingles beside me.
Conservatorship.
Her mother sucked in a breath. “That sounds extreme.”
“It sounds necessary,” Tiffany snapped. “The house is worth almost triple what she paid. And Peter can’t keep cleaning up this mess forever.”
“What if she says the signature is fake?”
“It won’t matter if a judge thinks she’s slipping.”
Something scraped across the counter. Paper.
Then Tiffany said, in the same bright voice she used in stores and restaurants when pretending to be charming, “Besides, once the sale goes through, we can put her somewhere lovely. She’ll have a little room, meals, people her own age. She should be grateful.”
I don’t remember breathing.
I remember the cold siding under my fingers.
I remember the taste of metal in my mouth.
I remember the sound of a spoon clinking against a mug inside my own kitchen while they discussed filing me away like inconvenient furniture.
