Chapter 1 - THE THIRTY-FIRST CALLOn my thirty-first call, another woman answered my husband’s phone.
“He’s in the shower. We’re in Maui. Stop calling.”
For a second, I forgot the oxygen hissing beside Eleanor Morgan’s hospital bed.
I forgot the heart monitor.
I forgot the thin hand I had been holding for almost three hours.
Ocean surf came through Julian’s phone speaker.
Real waves.
Not a television.
Not a hotel lobby recording.
Maui.
My husband had told me he was in Chicago negotiating a financing package for Morgan Harbor Senior Living, the company his parents founded thirty-six years earlier.
Instead, Vanessa Cole was apparently standing close enough to his shower to answer his phone.
Eleanor’s eyes opened wider.
At seventy-four, she had become almost weightless during the last month of congestive heart failure, but there was nothing weak about the way she looked at the phone.
“Vanessa?” I asked.
A little laugh.
“Who else?”
I stopped breathing.
Julian had introduced Vanessa to me eighteen months earlier as an outside real-estate consultant helping Morgan Harbor restructure several aging properties.
Blonde ambition in expensive shoes, I had called her privately.
Julian said I was jealous.
Vanessa continued.
“He said his mother could wait until we got back.”
Eleanor heard every word.
Her fingers tightened around mine.
“Claire,” she whispered.
I ended the call.
“I’m sorry, Eleanor. He isn’t coming.”
Her breathing changed.
I leaned closer.
“Don’t try to talk.”
She ignored me.
Slowly, painfully, she reached beneath the neckline of her hospital gown.
A thin silver chain appeared.
Hanging from it was a tiny old-fashioned key.
Nurse Rachel Bennett entered with medication, stopped beside the doorway, and stared at it.
Eleanor pulled the chain over her head.
Her hand shook so hard I had to help.
Then she pressed the key into my palm.
Her fingers folded mine around it.
“Destroy him.”
“Eleanor—”
Her eyes stayed on mine.
The monitor accelerated.
Rachel crossed the room immediately.
I moved aside.
Eleanor took one shallow breath.
Then another.
The medical team came quickly after Rachel pressed the call button.
There was no dramatic speech after that.
No final revelation.
Eleanor had signed a do-not-resuscitate order three days earlier.
Rachel followed the plan Eleanor had chosen while a physician checked her.
I stood against the pale-blue curtain with the silver key cutting into my palm.
A few minutes later, the monitor no longer had a rhythm to measure.
My mother-in-law died at 9:17 p.m.
Julian was still in Maui.
Rachel covered Eleanor carefully and then looked at me.
Her eyes dropped to my closed fist.
“Keep that with you.”
“You know what it opens?”
“No.”
She hesitated.
“But yesterday, when I inventoried her valuables, she wouldn’t let me put that key in the hospital safe.”
I looked at Eleanor.
Rachel continued quietly.
“She said if her son came, I was not to let him take it.”
My phone vibrated.
Julian.
I answered.
“Claire, what the hell is going on? Why did you call thirty-one times?”
I looked at his mother’s covered body.
“Your mother is dead.”
Silence.
Then:
“What?”
“She died while Vanessa was telling us you were in Maui.”
His breathing stopped.
I expected grief.
Instead he asked:
“Did Mom give you anything before she died?”
May you like
I looked down at the silver key.
And that was when I understood Julian had known there was something to take.
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