Chapter 1 - THE BOARD THAT BROKE UNDER ME
The floor gave way beneath my left foot before I heard Vanessa enter the cabin.
One second I was crossing the bedroom with an armful of Mason’s old winter blankets.
The next, rotten pine cracked beneath my heel.
My leg dropped between two joists and my shoulder slammed into the dresser hard enough to send framed family photographs across the floor.
I hit my cheek against the edge on the way down.
For several seconds, I could only breathe.
At seventy-four, falling is not something you shake off because you’re embarrassed.
My face already felt swollen. When I pressed a tissue beneath my nose, red spotted the white paper.
Then I heard heels in the hallway.
Vanessa appeared in the bedroom doorway wearing an ivory skirt suit entirely wrong for a mountain cabin outside Nederland, Colorado.
She had driven up from Denver without telling me.
Her first expression was surprise.
Her second was anger.
“I sent you here to disappear,” she snapped. “Not tear up my house, you useless old woman.”
My house.
Mason had been dead eleven weeks, and Vanessa had started using that phrase about almost everything he touched.
The Cherry Hills home.
His Range Rover.
This cabin.
Even the framed photograph of Mason at seventeen that had belonged to me before he ever met her.
I pushed myself upright, gripping the loose floorboard.
That was when I saw something beneath it.
A clear plastic sleeve had been wedged between the joists.
Inside was a packet of papers.
Vanessa saw it too.
Her entire body changed.
I reached first.
“Give me that.”
She came across the room so quickly she caught the sleeve of my lavender cardigan and jerked me sideways.
Pain shot through my hip.
I clutched the packet against my chest.
“Let go of me.”
“Mason is dead,” she said. “Everything he left is mine.”
I twisted free and braced myself against the dresser.
“You knew this was here.”
“I said give it to me.”
That was answer enough.
I lifted the first page.
Mason’s signature sat near the bottom.
Above it were words I could make out despite my watering eye:
**PROPERTY TRANSFER / SECURITY INTEREST**
Vanessa reached again.
I slapped her hand away.
“He hid this from you for a reason.”
“You don’t understand what you’re reading.”
“Then explain why you’re trying to take it.”
Her face tightened.
I turned the page.
She stopped breathing.
“Don’t you dare read that page.”
I looked down.
The first line was handwritten in Mason’s cramped block lettering.
If anything happens to my mother—
Vanessa lunged.
I stepped back beside the broken floor.
“Don’t.”
For once, she listened.
Not because she respected me.
Because she was afraid I would fall again while holding whatever she had driven ninety minutes into the mountains to keep me from finding.
I read the line a second time.
My son had hidden documents beneath the floor of the cabin where Vanessa sent me after his funeral.
Which meant Mason had expected two things before he died.
May you like
That something might happen to me.
And that Vanessa could not be trusted with what he wanted me to know.
