But I hadn’t filed the public notice immediately. Miles had advised me to wait until the contest period window—or rather, to let them make the first move, so their intent to bypass the true will was documented.
Now they had made their move. They had forged ahead with the old will, ignored the possibility of a new one, and tried to physically displace me.
I walked to the living room and picked up the envelope Tessa had left. I didn’t need to open it to know it was a threat wrapped in legalese. I remembered Walter’s voice: Don’t wait for them to ask permission.
I wasn’t waiting anymore.
I walked to the front door, the same door I had closed on them an hour ago.
I locked the deadbolt. Then I engaged the second lock, the heavy brass slide bolt that Walter had installed forty years ago after a string of break-ins in the county. It made a solid, final thunk sound.
But that wasn’t enough. I went to the hallway closet and pulled out the small toolbox. I walked back to the front door.
With steady hands, I began to dismantle the entire handle mechanism. If they wanted to get back in on Friday with their keys, they were going to be very disappointed, because by the time the sun went down tonight, there wouldn’t be a keyhole left to insert a key into. I was going to replace every entry lock on the house with biometric smart locks that I had bought two weeks ago and hidden in the garage—locks that only responded to my fingerprint and a code that existed only in my head.
Let them come with their movers.
Let them come with their papers. I took the first screw out of the faceplate. Everything is arranged, Walter had said.
You just need to be awake. I was wide awake now, and I was about to give the Young family a very rude awakening.
I stood in the foyer, the screwdriver still heavy in my hand, listening to the silence of the house. The new biometric lock on the front door hummed softly, a green light pulsing once before fading into the matte black finish.
It was done. The physical perimeter was secure. But as I stared at the door, my mind drifted back to the conversations that had led me to this extreme measure.
The ambush today hadn’t come out of nowhere. It had been foreshadowed in a hundred small, slippery comments over the last three weeks. They were like hairline fractures in a dam—invisible at first, but if you ran your fingers over them, you could feel the pressure building behind the concrete.
I walked back into the kitchen and sat down at the island.
I opened my laptop. While I waited for the system to boot up, I let myself replay the tea summit from ten days ago. It had been a Sunday.
The funeral flowers were just starting to wilt on the sideboard, dropping dead petals onto the mahogany surface. Elaine and Grant had come over under the pretense of checking on me. They brought pastries from a bakery in the city, the kind that cost eight dollars a piece and tasted like cardboard.
“We are just worried about you, Piper,” Elaine had said, pouring tea into Grandfather’s delicate china.
She didn’t ask if I wanted tea; she just poured it. “This house, it is a monster to maintain. Have you seen the heating bill for last January?
I found it in the study.”
She had been snooping. Of course she had.
“It is high,” I had replied, keeping my voice neutral. “But the insulation in the attic helps.”
“Does it?” Grant chimed in.
He was leaning against the counter, eating a croissant without a plate, letting flakes fall onto the floor I had just swept. “We were looking at the property tax assessment. It went up again this year.
Twelve thousand dollars. Piper, that is not pocket change for a girl your age.”
“I have savings,” I said.
“Savings burn fast,” Grant said, shaking his head with a grimace that was supposed to look like paternal concern but looked more like a bank manager denying a loan. “And then there is the inheritance tax implications.
If we don’t handle the transfer correctly, the government is going to take forty percent. Do you want that?”
“I don’t think it is forty percent for direct descendants,” I said softly.
“You are not a tax attorney, honey,” Elaine said, cutting me off with a smile that was all teeth. “Grant has been talking to his people.
They say the best way to protect the asset is to consolidate it. Put it in a trust where we are all listed, but Dad and I manage the overhead. For safety.”
Safety?
That was their favorite word. They used it to disguise control.
“And what about Tessa?” I had asked.
Elaine sighed, the sound of a martyr. “Tessa is fragile right now.
She needs stability. She has been looking at condos in the city, but the market is impossible. We were thinking, just hypothetically, that if we all owned this place, Tessa could use it as a base.
It is only fair. Grandpa and Grandma would have wanted everything split equally. Don’t you think?”
Fair.
That word triggered a memory so sharp I almost dropped my tea. I remembered Aunt Sarah seven years ago. Grant’s sister Sarah had lent my father $50,000 to cover a short-term liquidity issue in his business.
When she needed it back for her daughter’s tuition, Grant and Elaine had invited her to dinner. They didn’t bring a check. They brought a narrative.
They told the rest of the family that Sarah was being predatory, that she was trying to bankrupt her own brother during a hard time. They spun the story until Sarah wasn’t the lender anymore; she was the villain. She never got the money back.
She just got a reputation for being greedy.
I looked at my parents in that kitchen ten days ago, and I saw the same script being written for me. If I fought them on fairness, I would become the greedy granddaughter hoarding the family estate. So, I had decided to play the role they expected: the overwhelmed, soft-spoken girl who was good at following orders but bad at math.
“I suppose you are right,” I had said, lowering my eyes.
“It is a lot of money. I don’t know if I can handle the taxes alone.”
I saw the tension leave Grant’s shoulders. I saw Elaine exchange a quick, victorious glance with him.
They thought they had me. They thought I was folding.
“Exactly,” Grant said, his voice rich with relief. “We just want to help you, Piper.
We will get the paperwork drawn up. You won’t have to worry about a thing.”
That was ten days ago. Then came Tessa’s visit four days later.
She hadn’t brought pastries. She had brought a tape measure, though she tried to hide it in her purse. She claimed she was looking for a specific photo album of her childhood to scan for a project.
I let her in. I watched her. She didn’t look for albums.
She walked through the rooms with the cold, calculating gaze of a flipper. She opened the pantry and checked for dry rot. She flushed the toilets to check the pressure.
She stood in the center of the living room and spun around slowly, not taking in the memories, but calculating square footage.
“This wall,” she had said, tapping the partition between the kitchen and the dining room. “It is load-bearing, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” I said. “Grandpa built it to support the upper deck.”
“Pity,” Tessa muttered.
“It really closes off the flow. An open concept would add at least fifty thousand to the value.” She caught herself and looked at me, flashing a bright, fake smile. “I mean, if we ever decided to sell.
Which we won’t, obviously. But it is good to know the equity, right?”
“Right,” I said.
Later that afternoon, while she was pretending to look through a bookshelf in the hallway, I saw her pull out her phone. She angled it to take a picture of a document I had left intentionally on the side table.
It was a fake utility bill I had mocked up, showing an overdue balance of $3,000. I wanted them to think I was drowning. I wanted them to think the ship was sinking so they would rush to rescue it, and in their haste, make mistakes.
Tessa snapped the photo and slipped the phone back into her pocket.
“You know, Piper,” she said, her voice dripping with faux sympathy. “If you are struggling, you can tell us. Mom says you haven’t been working much since graduation.”
“I am managing,” I lied.
“Sure,” she said.
“But why struggle? We are
