The Funeral Lilies Were Still Wilting

The Greenwich house always smelled like fresh-cut flowers in the fall—not because we kept a garden, but because that’s when the neighborhood gardeners made their rounds, trimming hedges and planting mums in those perfect rows that made every driveway look like a magazine spread. October meant chrysanthemums and asters, meant leaves turning gold against white columns, meant the kind of beauty that costs money to maintain but looks effortless.

This October, though, the only flowers were funeral lilies. Dozens of them, in crystal vases I didn’t recognize and couldn’t name, filling the foyer and dining room with their heavy, sweet smell that reminded you something had died. They were wilting now, three days after we’d buried James, their white petals turning brown at the edges, water in the vases going cloudy.

I should have thrown them out. Should have cleared the space, opened windows, let fresh air back into the house. But I couldn’t bring myself to touch them. They were the last evidence of the funeral, the last proof that people had gathered to say goodbye to the man I’d loved for fifteen years.

That’s where I was standing—in the foyer, staring at dying flowers—when my mother-in-law ended my life as I knew it with six words.

“Pack your things and get out.”

Eleanor Sullivan stood at the top of the curved staircase in a cream Chanel suit that probably cost more than I’d made in a month as a nurse. Her silver hair was pulled back in that severe style she favored, not a strand out of place despite the fact that we’d just buried her son seventy-two hours ago. Her makeup was perfect. Her posture was perfect. Even her grief looked expensive and controlled.

I stood there in my black dress—the same one I’d worn to the funeral, because I hadn’t had the energy to change—shaking, trying to process what she’d just said.

“I’m sorry?”

She descended the stairs with measured steps, one hand trailing along the bannister, moving like she had all the time in the world while my world collapsed in real time.

“I said pack your things,” she repeated, her voice carrying that particular tone wealthy people use when they’re being deliberately patient with someone they consider beneath them. “You need to be out of this house by Sunday evening. I’m having the locks changed Monday morning.”

She reached the bottom of the stairs and smoothed her suit jacket, looking me dead in the eye.

“James is gone, Catherine, which means you’re no longer under his protection.”

My name is Catherine Walsh. Kate to my friends, Katie to my mother before she passed, and Cath to my brother who lives in Florida now and calls twice a year. I’m sixty-two years old, a retired nurse from Queens, and for fifteen years I thought I’d won some kind of cosmic lottery—not because I married money, though James certainly had that, but because I married a man who saw me.

Really saw me. Not the tired RN pulling double shifts at the hospital. Not the woman whose ex-husband had left her with nothing but debt and reasons to stop trusting people. But the person underneath all that—the woman who still laughed at bad puns, who cried at pharmaceutical commercials, who believed people were fundamentally good even when evidence suggested otherwise.

I met James Sullivan on a Tuesday in late spring, sixteen years ago now. He came through the oncology floor at Lenox Hill with his father, Marcus Sullivan Sr., who was there for follow-up appointments after successful treatment for early-stage prostate cancer. I wasn’t his nurse—not officially—but the floor was short-staffed that day and I ended up managing the waiting area, checking people in, making sure appointments ran on time.

James kept ending up at my station. First to ask where the coffee machine was. Then to tell me a terrible joke about a doctor and a lawyer that made me laugh despite myself. Then to ask my name. Then to ask if I always worked Tuesdays. Then to ask, very carefully, if hospital policy prevented nurses from having coffee with visitors whose fathers were being seen by doctors.

“Depends,” I’d said. “Are you trying to get me in trouble with hospital administration, or are you genuinely interested in coffee?”

“Genuinely interested,” he’d said with that quiet smile that would become my favorite thing about him. “Though I should warn you, I make terrible first impressions. I get better around the third or fourth date.”

“Confident,” I’d said.

“Hopeful,” he’d corrected.

We had coffee that Thursday. Dinner the following Tuesday. By summer we were inseparable, and by fall he’d asked me to marry him in the most unromantic way possible—sitting in his car outside my apartment building, stuck in traffic, both of us tired and hungry, when he suddenly said: “I want to do this forever. Be stuck in traffic with you. Come home to you. Build a life with you. Will you marry me?”

I said yes before he could finish the sentence.

We married in the big stone church in Greenwich, the one with the stained glass windows that threw colored light across the pews. Eleanor wore black to the wedding—not navy or charcoal, but actual black, like she was mourning—and sat in the front row with her lips pressed into a thin line. She’d made her feelings clear during the engagement: her son was marrying beneath himself, I was obviously after his money, this would all end badly.

James had told her, very calmly, that he loved me and intended to marry me regardless of her approval, and that she could either attend the wedding and be civil or stay home and be angry. She chose to attend, but civility was apparently negotiable.

For fifteen years, we existed in an uneasy détente. Eleanor tolerated me because James made it clear she had no other choice. She never called me by name if she could avoid it—always “James’s wife” or occasionally “the nurse”—and she maintained a careful distance that made every family gathering feel like navigating a minefield.

But James and I were happy. God, we were happy.

We didn’t live like rich people, despite the Greenwich address and the house that looked like it belonged in a design magazine. James had inherited the property from his grandmother, along with a substantial portfolio of commercial real estate investments that provided steady income without requiring him to work hundred-hour weeks. He could have been flashy, could have been one of those Manhattan types with yachts and penthouses and art collections they bought as investments rather than because they liked looking at art.

Instead, we cooked dinner in our modest kitchen, watched old movies on the couch, took weekend trips upstate when his energy allowed. We talked about books and politics and the small injustices of daily life. We argued about whether to get a dog (I wanted one, he worried we traveled too much) and whether the guest room should be painted blue or green (we compromised on gray).

We were, in the truest sense, partners. The kind of marriage where you finish each other’s sentences and know what the other person needs before they ask.

And then, three years into our marriage, James got sick.

It started with fatigue he couldn’t shake. Then night sweats. Then swollen lymph nodes that the doctor initially dismissed as a lingering virus. By the time they did the biopsy, the cancer had already spread beyond the initial site—non-Hodgkin lymphoma, stage three, aggressive but treatable.

The first round of chemo nearly killed him. Not the cancer, but the treatment—infections, complications, his body rejecting the very medicine meant to save him. I took a leave of absence from the hospital and became his full-time caregiver, learning to manage his medications, watching for warning signs, sleeping in a chair next to the bed because I was afraid to miss something critical if I was too far away.

We got him into remission after eight months. Eight months of hell that we never talked about as hell, because acknowledging how bad it was felt like giving the cancer power it didn’t deserve. We called it “the rough patch” and made jokes about his hair growing back weird and celebrated the day he could walk to the mailbox without getting winded.

We had four good years after that. Four years where life felt almost normal again, where we could plan trips and make long-term decisions and breathe without that constant background fear.

Then it came back.

Lymphoma is cruel that way—it can lurk, dormant, waiting. The second diagnosis came with worse odds, more aggressive treatment protocols, and the understanding that we were fighting to extend time, not guarantee survival. James was clear-eyed about it in a way I couldn’t be. He wanted quality of life over quantity, wanted to spend whatever time remained doing things that mattered rather than chasing experimental treatments that might buy him three extra months of feeling terrible.

But I couldn’t accept that. Not yet. Not when there were still options, still trials, still possibilities.

I poured my savings into treatments insurance wouldn’t cover. Flew us to Houston for a consultation with a specialist who was doing groundbreaking work with immunotherapy. Reduced my hours at the hospital to part-time so I could drive him to every appointment, every infusion, every follow-up scan. I learned the side effect profiles of every drug better than the pharmacy staff, could recite drug interactions and contraindications from memory.

When I retired last year at sixty-one—earlier than I’d planned, earlier than was financially smart—it wasn’t because I wanted to stop working. It was because James’s body was failing and he needed me home. Because there were nights when he couldn’t get out of bed without help, days when he couldn’t keep food down, weeks when the pain was so bad that all I could do was hold his hand and count the minutes until the next dose of morphine.

Eleanor visited exactly three times during those final six months. Each time, she sat in the formal living room we never used, accepting tea I made her, asking questions about treatment that felt more like she was auditing my care decisions than expressing genuine concern. She never offered to help. Never suggested she could sit with him so I could sleep. Never acknowledged that I was giving everything I had to keep her son comfortable and alive for as long as possible.

The last time she visited, two weeks before James died, she stood in the doorway of his bedroom while he slept, looked at the medical equipment we’d had installed, the pill organizers, the oxygen tanks, and said to me in a voice barely above a whisper: “You’ve certainly made him dependent on you.”

It was so absurd, so cruel, that I couldn’t even respond. I just stood there, exhausted, wearing the same clothes I’d worn the day before because laundry felt impossible, and stared at this woman who thought loving someone through their dying was some kind of calculated manipulation.

James died on a Thursday morning in early October, just as the sun was coming up. I was holding his hand. He’d been unconscious for two days, his breathing labored and irregular, and I’d known it was coming—the hospice nurse had warned me, explained what to look for, promised she’d be there—but knowing didn’t make it easier.

His breathing just… stopped. One moment there was that awful rasp, and then silence. The most profound silence I’ve ever experienced. I sat there holding his cooling hand, watching the sun rise through the bedroom window, and felt the entire structure of my life collapse inward like a star dying.

The funeral was three days later. A hundred people in that same stone church where we’d married, talking in hushed voices about what a good man James had been, how generous, how kind, how unfortunate. Eleanor sat in the front pew surrounded by distant Sullivan relatives I’d never met, accepting condolences with the grace of someone who’d been preparing for this role her whole life.

I sat alone in the second pew, which should have told me something.

After the burial, people came back to the house. Someone had arranged for caterers—probably Eleanor, though no one asked me—and suddenly our home was full of strangers in dark suits eating finger sandwiches and speaking in those careful, modulated tones people use around grief, like raising their voice might shatter something.

I moved through the rooms like a ghost, accepting hugs from people whose names I didn’t know, listening to stories about James I’d never heard, feeling increasingly untethered from reality. This was my house, my husband’s funeral, my grief—but somehow I was the guest here, the outsider, the woman who didn’t quite belong.

By evening, everyone had left except Eleanor and a few Sullivan cousins who lingered in the dining room discussing family business in low voices. I excused myself, went upstairs, and sat on the edge of the bed where James had died, still in my funeral dress, too tired to cry anymore.

I must have fallen asleep there, because I woke up to darkness and the sound of car doors closing, engines starting, the house settling into silence.

I spent the next two days in a fog. People called—my brother, a few of my old coworkers from the hospital, James’s lawyer Marcus Rivera—but I let everything go to voicemail. I moved from room to room, touching things that belonged to James, trying to feel close to him through objects. His reading glasses on the nightstand. His watch in the dish by the bathroom sink. His favorite sweater still hanging in the closet, smelling faintly of his cologne.

The funeral lilies wilted. The house grew quiet. And I existed in that strange liminal space where grief is so consuming that basic functions like eating or showering feel like climbing mountains.

That’s where I was—standing in the foyer on the third day after the funeral, staring at dying flowers—when Eleanor came downstairs and told me to leave.

“Pack your things and get out.”

The words didn’t process immediately. My brain was too slow, too muffled by grief and exhaustion to parse what she was saying.

“I’m sorry?” I said, turning to look at her.

She descended the curved staircase with that measured grace, her hand trailing along the mahogany bannister, her expression composed but cold.

“I said pack your things. You need to be out of this house by Sunday evening. I’m having the locks changed Monday morning.”

She reached the bottom of the stairs, smoothed her Chanel suit—cream colored, expensive, perfect—and looked at me with eyes that held no warmth, no sympathy, nothing but calculation.

“James is gone, Catherine, which means you’re no longer under his protection.”

My mouth went dry. “What are you talking about?”

She moved past me into the dining room, gestured for me to follow like I was a servant being summoned. I followed on shaking legs, feeling the world tilt sideways.

She stood in the dining room doorway—the same dining room where I’d served James soup a week ago, where we’d celebrated our fourteenth anniversary with takeout Chinese, where we’d had a thousand ordinary meals that had felt like enough—and pulled a manila folder from James’s grandmother’s secretary desk.

Papers spilled across the table. Legal documents, property deeds, investment statements, things I’d never seen before and didn’t understand.

“The house, the investments, the portfolio—all in James’s name,” she said, fanning the documents out like she was dealing cards. “As they should be. As they’ve always been. Did you really think my son would leave his family’s fortune to a nobody nurse from Queens?”

The words landed like physical blows. Each one calculated to hurt, to diminish, to erase.

“This is my home,” I said, my voice coming out smaller than I wanted, shakier than I’d intended. “James and I lived here for fifteen years. This is where we—”

She laughed. Actually laughed, a sharp sound that cut through my sentence like a knife.

“Your home? Oh, my dear, you really haven’t been paying attention.” She picked up one of the documents, held it up like evidence. “Everything is in the Sullivan family name. The house, the business interests, the portfolio—thirty-three million dollars in liquid assets alone, not counting the real estate holdings. Did you think you were going to inherit that? Did you think fifteen years of playing nurse to my son entitled you to my family’s money?”

“I wasn’t playing—”

“You were a convenient caretaker,” she continued, her voice smooth as glass. “Someone to manage his medications and drive him to appointments while I handled the actual family business. Your services are no longer required. Frankly, they haven’t been required since the funeral ended, but I gave you a few days to grieve. That’s more than generous, considering.”

I grabbed the edge of the table to steady myself. “James would never—he wouldn’t have left me with nothing. We were married. We had a life together.”

“You had an arrangement,” Eleanor corrected. “You provided care, he provided a comfortable lifestyle. Now the arrangement is over. You can take your personal belongings, of course. I’m not a monster. But everything else stays. The furniture, the art, the household items—all Sullivan property. I assume you still have your little apartment in Queens? The one you were renting when you met James?”

“I gave that up when we got married.”

“How unfortunate.” She didn’t sound like she found it unfortunate at all. “Then I suggest you find alternative accommodations quickly. You have until Sunday. Six PM. After that, you’ll be trespassing.”

“Where am I supposed to go?”

She shrugged, an elegant lifting of shoulders that conveyed perfect indifference. “That’s not my concern. You’re a nurse—I’m sure you have friends, colleagues, resources. You’re a capable woman. You’ll figure it out.”

“Eleanor, please—”

“Mrs. Sullivan,” she corrected sharply. “We’re not on familiar terms, Catherine. We never have been. You were married to my son, but you were never family. And now that James is gone, there’s no reason to continue this… pretense.”

She gathered the papers, slid them back into the manila folder, and tucked it under her arm.

“I’ll be back Sunday afternoon to ensure you’ve vacated. Please don’t make this unpleasant. Just pack your things and go quietly. It’s what James would have wanted—no drama, no scenes. Surely you can give him that much.”

She walked out of the dining room, her heels clicking against the hardwood floors, leaving me standing there alone, surrounded by dying flowers and the ruins of everything I’d thought was true.

I don’t remember much of the next few hours. I moved through the house in a daze, pulling out suitcases from the attic, loading them with clothes that suddenly felt like they belonged to someone else. Fifteen years of marriage reduced to four suitcases and three cardboard boxes.

I left behind the coffee maker James got me for our fifth anniversary, the one with the timer so I could wake up to fresh coffee every morning. Left behind the throw blankets we’d picked together at a craft fair upstate, arguing good-naturedly about whether the blue one or the green one would look better on the couch. Left behind the books on his nightstand, the photos in frames throughout the house, the bed where I’d held his hand as he took his last breath.

Everything that mattered was either too big to take or too painful to carry.

By the time the sun went down, my entire life fit into the trunk and back seat of my ten-year-old Honda. I stood in the foyer one last time, looking at those wilting funeral lilies, and thought about watering them. About taking care of one more thing before I left.

But they were dying anyway. And I had nowhere to put fresh flowers.

I locked the door behind me—using the keys that would stop working Monday morning—and drove south on Route 9 until I found an extended-stay hotel that looked clean enough and cheap enough and far enough away that I wouldn’t have to see the Greenwich exit signs every time I went anywhere.

The room smelled like bleach and other people’s bad luck. The kind of place I’d discharged patients to after long hospital stays when they had nowhere else to go, when family couldn’t or wouldn’t take them in, when the social workers had exhausted every other option. I’d always felt terrible sending people to places like this, understanding it was temporary but knowing how that kind of temporary could stretch and stretch until it became permanent.

Now I was one of those people. Sixty-two years old, recently widowed, essentially homeless, sitting on the edge of a stiff bed in my funeral dress because I was too tired and too numb to change clothes.

My phone buzzed. A text message from a number I recognized: Marcus Rivera, James’s lawyer.

Call me when you can. We need to discuss the estate.

I stared at the message until the letters blurred. The estate. Of course. Someone needed to officially inform me that James had left everything to his mother, that I was walking away with nothing, that fifteen years of marriage and three years of keeping him alive counted for nothing in the eyes of the law.

I thought about not calling. About just… letting it go. Signing whatever papers they needed me to sign to finalize the transfer of assets to Eleanor, accepting whatever small mercy they might offer—maybe a few thousand dollars, enough to get me through the next few months—and disappearing quietly like she wanted.

But something in me, some small core of resistance I didn’t know I still had, made me set an alarm for early morning. Made me decide I would call Marcus, would at least hear the official verdict, would face this last humiliation head-on rather than avoiding it.

I fell asleep in my funeral dress, on top of the covers, with my phone charging on the nightstand and the smell of bleach in my nose.

At 6:30 the next morning, I sat on the edge of the same bed, in the same dress, and dialed Marcus Rivera’s number.

He answered on the second ring, his voice warm and alert despite the early hour.

“Kate,” he said, and something in the way he said my name—gentle, concerned, almost protective—made my throat tight. “Where are you?”

“Extended-stay off Route 9,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Eleanor says James left me nothing. She had me thrown out of the house. Locks are being changed Monday.”

There was a long pause. I could hear him breathing, could almost feel him processing what I’d just said. When he spoke again, something like anger had crept into his tone, controlled but unmistakable.

“She did what?”

“She said James left her the house, the business, thirty-three million dollars. Said I was just… staff. Temporary help that’s no longer needed.”

“Kate.” He said my name like he was trying to get my attention, like he needed me to focus. “Listen to me very carefully. Do not go back to that house. Do not sign anything Eleanor gives you. Do not respond to any more of her messages or calls. Do you understand?”

“Marcus, please don’t try to be kind. I just need you to tell me the truth. Whatever James left or didn’t leave, I can handle it. I just need to know.”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” he said, and his voice was tight now, controlled fury bleeding through professional composure. “Tell you the truth. Whatever Eleanor told you about James’s will—she’s either lying, or she’s seen the wrong documents. Actually, scratch that. She’s definitely seen the wrong documents, because what she told you is completely false.”

My heart started pounding. “What?”

“I’m coming to you. Right now. What hotel?”

“Marcus, you don’t have to—”

“What hotel, Kate?”

I told him. He said he’d be there in forty minutes and hung up before I could ask more questions.

I sat there holding my phone, staring at the blank screen, trying to process what he’d just said. She’s either lying or she’s seen the wrong documents. What did that mean? Had Eleanor made a mistake? Had she looked at old paperwork, something from before James and I married?

Or—and this thought made my hands shake—had she lied on purpose?

I stood up, caught my reflection in the mirror over the dresser, and barely recognized myself. Still in the funeral dress, hair uncombed, face pale, eyes red from crying and lack of sleep. I looked like exactly what I felt like: a woman who’d lost everything and was waiting to hear exactly how much “everything” really was.

I changed into jeans and a sweater, washed my face, tried to make myself look less like someone who’d spent the night crying in a hotel room. By the time I heard the knock on the door, I’d managed to pull myself together enough to open it without completely falling apart.

Marcus Rivera stood there with his briefcase, wearing a suit despite the early hour, looking at me with an expression that was part concern and part something else I couldn’t quite identify. Determination, maybe. Or anger on my behalf.

“Can I come in?”

I stepped back, let him enter the small room with its unmade bed and my suitcases still packed against the wall. He looked around, took in the situation—the extended-stay hotel, the luggage, the woman who three days ago had buried her husband and now had nowhere to go—and his jaw tightened.

“Tell me exactly what Eleanor said to you.”

I did. Every word I could remember, from “pack your things” to “you were never family” to the manila folder full of documents showing everything in James’s name. By the time I finished, Marcus was pacing the small room, one hand running through his hair, looking like he wanted to hit something.

“That manipulative, cruel—” He stopped himself, took a breath, forced his professional composure back into place. “Okay. Okay. Here’s what actually happened, Kate. Are you sitting down?”

I sat on the edge of the bed. He pulled out the desk chair, set his briefcase on his lap, and opened it.

“James came to see me eight years ago, right after his first remission. He wanted to update his will, make sure everything was ironclad, legally unassailable. He was very specific about what he wanted, and more specifically, about who he wanted to protect.”

“Eleanor?” I said weakly.

“You,” he corrected. “He wanted to protect you from Eleanor. He told me—and I’m quoting here—’My mother is going to try to take everything from Kate the minute I’m gone. I need you to make sure that’s impossible.'”

My vision blurred. “He said that?”

“He did. And then he spent three months working with me to restructure his entire estate in a way that would ensure you were protected. Not just financially, but legally. So that no matter what Eleanor tried—and he knew she’d try something—you’d be secure.”

Marcus pulled out a thick document, bound and official-looking, and set it on the bed between us.

“This is James’s actual will. The real one. Witnessed, notarized, filed with the probate court. It supersedes any other documents Eleanor might have found.”

He opened it to a page marked with a yellow tab, pointed to a section of dense legal text.

“James left you the house. Free and clear. He left you three million dollars in liquid assets. He left you control of his primary investment portfolio, which is currently valued at approximately twelve million. And he left you a substantial income trust that will pay you roughly two hundred thousand per year for the rest of your life.”

I couldn’t breathe. The numbers were too big, too impossible. “That can’t—Marcus, that’s not possible. Eleanor showed me documents. Everything was in his name, in the Sullivan family—”

“Everything was in his name,” Marcus agreed. “But being in his name doesn’t mean it goes to his mother. Kate, you were his wife. His spouse. Under Connecticut law, you have significant inheritance rights regardless of what any will says. But James didn’t want you to have to fight for what was yours. So he made it explicit. Clear. Unambiguous.”

He pulled out another document. “This is a letter James wrote to Eleanor two years ago, when he updated his will again after the cancer came back. He told her directly what he’d done. Told her that everything was going to you, that she would receive a modest bequest but nothing more, and that any attempt to contest the will or harass you would result in her losing even that.”

“She knew?” My voice came out as a whisper. “She knew all this and she still told me to leave?”

“She knew. Which means she was banking on you not knowing. Banking on you being too grief-stricken, too overwhelmed, too intimidated to question her. She thought she could bully you out of the house before you spoke to me, before you learned the truth.”

He handed me the letter. James’s handwriting, that careful script I’d seen on birthday cards and grocery lists and love notes left on the kitchen counter.

Mother—I’m writing to inform you that I’ve updated my will. Catherine will inherit the house, the majority of my liquid assets, and control of my investment portfolio. You will receive $250,000, which I trust is more than adequate given your own substantial resources. I’m making my wishes clear now to avoid any confusion or conflict later. Kate has been my partner, my caregiver, and my greatest joy. She deserves to be secure, and I’m ensuring that she will be. Any attempt to contest this will or to make Kate’s life difficult after I’m gone will result in your bequest being donated to charity. Please don’t make me choose between my mother and my wife. You won’t like how that choice resolves.

I read it three times. Four. Five. Until the words blurred and I had to set it down before my tears damaged the paper.

“Why didn’t he tell me?” I asked. “Why didn’t he ever say—”

“He didn’t want you to have to think about it,” Marcus said gently. “He didn’t want his illness or his death to become about money. He wanted you to focus on whatever time you had left together, not on estate planning and inheritance law. He trusted me to handle this part so you wouldn’t have to.”

I looked up at Marcus, this man I barely knew but who James had trusted implicitly, who had driven here at 6:30 in the morning to tell me the truth.

“What happens now?”

“Now,” he said, standing up, “we go to that house and we inform Eleanor Sullivan that she has no legal right to it, that she certainly has no right to change the locks, and that if she’s removed any of your belongings, she’ll be returning them immediately. And then we start the formal probate process, which will take a few months, but during which you’ll have full access to the house and enough funds to live comfortably.”

“She’s going to fight this.”

“She can try. She’ll lose. James made sure of that. The will is airtight, I have documentation of everything, and Connecticut law strongly favors surviving spouses. Plus—” he smiled grimly, “—I have that letter. If she contests, she loses her $250,000. I don’t think she’s that stupid.”

I stood up on shaking legs, looked around the hotel room that smelled like bleach and temporary desperation, and felt something I hadn’t felt in days.

Hope. Anger. A fierce determination not to be erased by a woman who’d never believed I deserved to be part of her family.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

The drive back to Greenwich felt surreal. Marcus followed me in his car, both of us pulling into the circular driveway with its perfect hedges and its ghosts of funeral flowers. Eleanor’s Mercedes was parked by the front door, which meant she was inside, probably going through things, deciding what she wanted to claim, what she wanted to discard.

I used my key—the one that wouldn’t work Monday, except now it turned out Monday wouldn’t matter because the house was mine—and walked into the foyer.

Eleanor was in the dining room, exactly where I’d expected her to be, going through the drawers of James’s desk. She looked up when we entered, her expression shifting from concentration to confusion to fury in the space of a heartbeat.

“What are you doing here? I told you Sunday—”

“Mrs. Sullivan,” Marcus said, his voice professional but carrying an edge that could cut glass. “I’m James’s attorney. We need to have a conversation about his estate.”

“I know what’s in the estate,” Eleanor said sharply. “I’ve seen the documents.”

“You’ve seen documents,” Marcus corrected. “Wrong documents. Outdated documents. Or possibly fake documents you created yourself, though I’m hoping you’re not quite that foolish.”

Her face went pale, then flushed red. “How dare you—”

“I dare because I have James’s actual will, properly executed and filed with probate court, which explicitly leaves this house to his wife Catherine. Along with the majority of his assets. You received a letter two years ago explaining this. Do you need me to refresh your memory?”

He pulled out the letter, held it up. I watched Eleanor’s eyes flick to it, saw recognition flash across her face, saw her scramble for an explanation.

“That letter was—James was sick when he wrote that. He wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“He was perfectly clear,” Marcus said. “And more importantly, his will was executed eight years ago, after his first remission, when he was unquestionably of sound mind. Updated again four years ago. And witnessed by people who will testify, under oath, that he knew exactly what he was doing.”

“This is my family’s house—”

“This is Catherine’s house,” Marcus interrupted. “Left to her by her husband. You have no claim to it. None. And the fact that you tried to evict her three days after his funeral, using false information about his estate, constitutes harassment at minimum. Possibly fraud. Possibly elder abuse. Would you like me to continue?”

Eleanor looked at me, her expression transforming from fury to calculation. She was trying to find an angle, a way to spin this, a argument that might work.

“Catherine,” she said, her voice softening into something that might have passed for conciliatory if I hadn’t heard her three days ago calling me “convenient caretaker.” “Surely we can work this out between us. Family doesn’t need lawyers involved. James would want us to—”

“Don’t,” I said, and my voice came out stronger than I expected. “Don’t use James’s name like that. Don’t pretend you care what he would have wanted. You called me a nobody nurse from Queens. You said I was temporary help whose services were no longer required. You gave me three days to pack up fifteen years of my life and get out.”

“I was upset. I’d just lost my son—”

“And I’d just lost my husband,” I said, feeling anger finally cutting through the grief, sharp and clarifying. “I held his hand when he died. I sat with him through every treatment, every bad night, every moment of pain. I loved him. Actually loved him, not as an asset or a legacy or a piece of family business. And you waited three days—three days, Eleanor—to throw me out like garbage.”

“This is what he wanted,” Marcus said, holding up the will. “This document, Kate. This is James telling you that he saw everything you did, everything you sacrificed, everything you were to him. And he wanted to make sure you’d be okay. That you’d have security. That his mother couldn’t take it away from you out of spite.”

Eleanor stood there, silent, her face a mask of controlled fury.

“You have until end of business today to remove any personal items you’ve brought to this house,” Marcus continued. “Catherine’s belongings remain. Everything in this house remains, as it’s all part of the estate.