“What happens then?” Eustace asked.
“We get nothing,” Cordelia told her, finding her voice as she deflated. If she stayed, John’s loan sharks would come for her, but the inheritance might be just enough to pay the worst of them off. If she walked away with no inheritance and no sale, however, there was an aluminum baseball bat waiting with her name on it. She needed this too much to refuse.
“Quite right. Everything would revert to the contingency laid out in the trust,” he told them.
“Contingency?” Cordelia asked.
Bennett smiled, and Cordelia felt a little chill creep its way down her back. “Nothing that would, at that point, concern you.”
Her phonepinged again. Cordelia looked down at it.
If you don’t come back, we’ll take the debt out of your neighbor.Though I doubt she’s got enough years left to pay.
An image followed, the black and tan face of a dog, ears flattened and whale-eyed with fear. It was Perry Ellis.
CHAPTER SEVENTHETRUTH
CORDELIA’S GUT TWISTEDwith guilt as she stood in the vestibule watching the attorney drive away, peering through the narrow windowpanes in the door, the ripples in the cylinder glass distorting his shape, morphing him into something unrecognizable. It wasn’t just her life on the line now, but an innocent woman’s. Someone she called afriend.She’d never intended to entangle anyone else in her sordid marriage and financial problems, least of all her kindly neighbor, Mrs. Robichaud, but her sudden departure must have looked like an escape attempt. If they’d been watching her for a while, which she now suspected, then they’d seen her with Claire and her beastly little terrier. They knew where her soft spots were.
And that meant it was only a matter of time before they realized she had a sister. She turned back to Eustace, who was standing in the stair hall, a packet of papers for them to sign clutched to her chest.
“Do you believe all that?” she asked her sister. “About the trust?”
Eustace shrugged. “He’d have no reason to lie.”
Cordelia nodded. Of course, her sister was right. It was just such a strange caveat. She’d never heard of an inheritance beingbound up with the estate through a trust. As if the house were more important than the heirs.
“Do you?” Eustace asked. “Believe him?”
She bit her bottom lip. “Yes, but…”
“There’s something he’s not saying,” Eustace finished.
Cordelia exhaled. “Yes. That.”
She didn’t think the old man had a dishonest bone in his body, but she did get the feeling he wasn’t telling them everything. Maybe it was for their own good. Or maybe he didn’t want to overwhelm them. Or maybe he was bound by his word and legal obligations to their aunt. Cordelia didn’t know. She only knew that she felt like she and Eustace were missing the punch line to a joke everyone else was laughing at. “He called the trustmodest,but nothing about this place is modest.”
“Isn’t that how generational wealth goes?” her sister asked. “It gets squandered by your forebears until eventually there’s nothing respectable left but a name.”
“You heard what he said,” Cordelia told her. “We’ll get nothing if we refuse to live here. Not even the house.”
“As though we aren’t even family,” Eustace concluded. “As if our genetics can be erased with a few legal documents.”
But their genetics weren’t at stake right now—their inheritance was. And Cordelia needed money more than blood. With the house tied up in the trust, she could lose both—her share of whatever money her aunt left her and the considerable amount they stood to make on the sale of the property. Under her current circumstances, Cordelia couldn’t think of a worse outcome.
“So, what do we do?” Eustace asked.
Cordelia chewed her bottom lip. “Nothing. For now. I’m going to have these reviewed by another attorney—someone not connected to the family. We need a second opinion.”
Bennett Togers’ first allegiance was to their aunt, after all. To seeing her final wishes carried out. But Cordelia and Eustaceneeded someone on their side, someone who could put their interests over those of their deceased relatives.
“What do we do when he comes back? You heard him—the funeral is in the morning. He’s going to expect these,” Eustace said, flipping through the papers in her hand.
“We stall,” Cordelia told her. “We stay here just until we can get our own legal counsel and sort this out. There has to be a loophole.”
Eustace walked over and dropped the papers onto the bench of the hall tree. “I don’t know. Maybe it would just be easier to move.”
Cordelia rounded on her. “Permanently? Don’t you have a life waiting for you back in Colorado? What about your business?”
