My stepmother called just as the day was folding into evening, her voice dripping with a satisfaction so sharp I could almost see the smile stretching across her face. She told me, with deliberate precision, that I would never set foot in the family beach house again—that every lock had already been changed.

Her face didn’t simply change. It collapsed and rearranged itself in real time, like wet paper burning from the edges inward. The smugness drained first. Then the color. Then the cool, rehearsed certainty. In its place came something rawer and much uglier: calculation mixed with fear.

Attorney Evelyn Porter got out of her own car at almost the same moment, smooth and composed in a charcoal coat, leather folder tucked under her arm, her silver hair pinned back in a neat twist that had survived a two-hour drive without surrendering a single strand. She closed her door with quiet precision and didn’t even glance at me first. She looked at Diana.

“Good morning,” Evelyn said.

Diana straightened. “Who are you?”

“I’m Evelyn Porter, counsel for Rebecca Hale.” She took one more step up the walk. “And unless there has been a very unusual and highly improbable change in Massachusetts trust law overnight, you are standing on property held in trust for my client.”