They stopped sending aggressive emails about wasted potential and financial burdens. Instead, they pivoted to a strategy that was infinitely more terrifying. They started being nice.
It began on Wednesday evening, just a day after I had closed the door on their eviction notice.
I was in the kitchen labeling a box of Grandfather’s journals—not to pack them away, but to organize them for the library I planned to build—when the doorbell rang. It wasn’t the sharp, demanding ring I was used to. It was a cheerful, rhythmic pattern.
Ding-dong-ding. I checked the new camera feed on my phone before I moved. Standing on the porch were Elaine and Tessa.
They weren’t holding legal papers this time. They were holding a casserole dish and a bottle of wine.
I opened the door, leaving the security chain engaged for a fraction of a second too long, just to let them feel the resistance. Then I slid it back and smiled.
My smile was a mirror of theirs: thin, polite, and completely empty.
“Surprise!” Elaine chirped. She was wearing an apron over her designer blouse, a costume of domesticity she hadn’t worn since I was six. “We thought you might be too busy packing to cook, so we brought dinner.
Lasagna. Grandma’s recipe.”
It wasn’t Grandma’s recipe. Grandma June used a specific blend of sausage and fennel.
I could smell the distinct, sterile aroma of a store-bought gourmet meal wafting from the dish. But I stepped back. “That is so thoughtful,” I said.
“We are family, Piper,” Tessa said, breezing past me.
She placed the wine on the entry table. “We just want to spend some quality time together before the transition.”
The transition? That was their new word for kicking me out.
It sounded like a corporate merger or a gender reveal party or a death. We sat in the dining room. The air was thick with a performance so elaborate it deserved a stage.
Elaine served the lasagna with a flourish, talking about how much she missed the old days when we would all gather here for the Fourth of July. She conveniently forgot that for the last ten years, she had spent every Fourth of July in the Hamptons because the humidity at Harbor Hollow frizzed her hair.
“Do you remember when Dad taught you to ride a bike on the driveway?” Tessa asked, taking a sip of wine. Her eyes were locked on my face, scanning for a crack in my armor.
“I fell into the hydrangeas.”
“Exactly,” Elaine laughed, a sound like breaking glass. “Such good memories. That is why we want to keep this house in the family, Piper.
To protect those memories. We were worried that if you were here all alone, you might get overwhelmed. You might sell it to strangers.”
“I would never sell,” I said softly, staring at my fork.
“Of course not,” Grant said.
He had arrived ten minutes late, claiming traffic, but I suspected he had been on a call with his bank. He cut into his lasagna with surgical precision. “But life happens.
Taxes happen. We just want to take the burden off your shoulders. You understand that, right?
This isn’t about taking something from you. It is about doing something for you.”
I chewed slowly. “I appreciate the concern.”
Then came the test.
Tessa looked around the room, her gaze lingering on the heavy oak wainscoting. “You know,” she said, her voice light and teasing. “If this place were mine—legally, I mean—I would probably paint all this wood white.
Make it look like a beach cottage. Open it up. Maybe knock down that wall to the kitchen.”
She paused, waiting.
She wanted me to snap. She wanted me to scream that Grandfather carved that wood himself. She wanted me to reveal that I cared too much because if I cared too much, I was unstable.
If I was unstable, I was easy to dismiss.
I took a sip of water. “White is a very popular color,” I said flatly. “It bounces the light well.”
Tessa blinked.
She looked disappointed. She had thrown a dart and it had hit a wall of marshmallows. “Right,” she said, recovering.
“Exactly.”
“Glad you agree,” Grant cleared his throat. The pleasantries were over. Now came the extraction.
“Speaking of the transition,” Grant said, leaning forward. “We need to make sure the paperwork is clean for the handover on Friday. I was looking for the original property tax binders.
The ones from ’98 through 2005. Walter was obsessive about keeping them. Do you know where they are?”
“And the safe key,” Elaine added, trying to sound casual.
“The one for the wall safe in the study. I think I left a few pieces of jewelry in there years ago. I should probably get them out before the movers come.”
She hadn’t left jewelry there.
The safe contained the original deed to the land, the one Hans signed in 1945. They wanted the originals. They wanted to erase any paper trail that didn’t match their narrative.
I looked at them. Three predators sitting around a table, napkins on their laps, asking me to hand over the knife they intended to stab me with. I widened my eyes, channeling every ounce of the “overwhelmed daughter” persona they had assigned to me.
“I am not sure,” I stammered.
“I started moving boxes around last week. Everything is in such a mess. There are piles everywhere.
I think I saw the tax binder in the garage. Or maybe the attic.”
“The attic?” Grant’s eye twitched. He hated the attic.
It was dusty and hot.
“I am sorry,” I said, dropping my head. “I am just so bad at organizing. You know me.
Always scatterbrained.”
“It is okay, sweetie,” Elaine said through gritted teeth. “We can look for them together on Friday.”
“I could go look now,” Tessa suggested. “While we have dessert.”
“The bulb is out in the attic,” I lied.
“It is pitch black up there, and there are bats.”
“Bats?” Tessa recoiled.
“Huge ones,” I said. “I would hate for you to get bitten right before the wedding photos.”
Tessa sat back down. The immediate threat of a physical search was averted, but I knew I had only bought time.
Later that night, while Elaine was pretending to help me wash dishes—which really meant she was standing by the sink holding a towel while I did the scrubbing—I walked into the living room to collect the wine glasses.
Tessa was sitting on the sofa, her phone illuminated in the dark. She didn’t hear me approach on the thick rug. I stood behind the sofa for three seconds.
That was all I needed. She wasn’t on Instagram. She wasn’t texting her fiancé.
She was on a website with a garish yellow banner that read: QuickInheritance.com – Expedited Estate Transfers – Title Correction.
I saw her thumb hovering over a button that said UPLOAD WILL.
My blood ran cold, then hot. Miles had warned me about this. These were the document mills—automated legal services that didn’t ask questions, didn’t verify mental capacity, and didn’t check for conflicting trusts.
They just took a PDF and a credit card and generated a filing.
“Is the Wi-Fi working okay?” I asked loudly.
Tessa jumped so hard she almost dropped the phone. She slammed the screen against her chest, her eyes wide with guilt. “Jesus, Piper,” she hissed.
“Don’t sneak up on people.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Just wanted to get your glass.”
“I was just checking work emails,” she lied, her face flushing pink.
“You work too hard,” I said. I took the glass and walked back to the kitchen.
My hands were shaking.
Not from fear, but from rage. They weren’t just greedy; they were reckless. Tessa was about to feed my grandfather’s legacy into a meat grinder of automated law just to save a few weeks of probate.
That was the moment I decided the passive defense wasn’t enough.
The next morning, Thursday, I ramped up the physical security. I had already installed the biometric deadbolts, but I had kept them in dummy mode, meaning they still accepted the old physical keys. I didn’t want to lock them out completely until the trap was sprung.
But now I needed eyes. I spent the morning installing micro cameras. I didn’t put them in the obvious places.
I put one inside the hollowed-out spine of a book on the hallway shelf. I put one in the ventilation grate overlooking the kitchen. I put one facing the driveway, hidden in the birdhouse.
These weren’t just for security; they were for the audience. I hoped to never need a judge.
By Thursday afternoon, the “nice” act began to crumble. The deadline was twenty-four hours away, and they still didn’t have the tax binders, the safe combination, or the feeling that I was truly packing.
Elaine called me at 2:00 in the
