“Emily, if you think you’re being drugged, we need to go to a hospital tonight—”
“No.” The word came out sharp, immediate. “If I leave this house before the hearing, she’ll say I fled treatment. That’s worse.”
“What hearing?”
She pulled a folded sheet of paper from inside her sleeve — soft at the creases, like it had been carried and re-hidden many times. “I found this in my father’s study. I don’t understand all of it. But I understand the word ‘incompetency.’”
I unfolded it enough to catch fragments in the dark — a case number, the words petition for conservatorship, a date three weeks out. My own birthday flashed through my head unbidden: the way some dates matter more once you know what’s tied to them.
“When do you turn twenty-seven?” I asked.
Emily went very still. “How did you know that mattered?”
“Because someone always tells you a filing date like it’s a coincidence, right before a birthday that isn’t.”
She let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “My grandmother’s trust. It’s supposed to come to me when I turn twenty-seven. Free and clear. No trustee, no oversight. My mother’s never forgiven her for that.”
A light flicked on in an upstairs window. Emily flinched like she’d been struck.
“That’s her room,” she said. “She’s up.”
“Emily—”
“Take it.” She shoved the folded paper and the pill bottle deeper into my jacket pocket, closing my fingers over them with both of her cold hands. “Don’t tell Daniel yet. Not until you know what he already signed.”
“What did he sign?”
The back door creaked.
“Emily?” Victoria’s voice, pitched sweet and carrying, cut across the dark yard. “Darling, it’s past your medicine.”
Emily’s whole body changed in the space of a breath — spine straightening, chin lifting, the fear folding itself away beneath something rehearsed and smooth. “Coming, Mom,” she called back, her voice bright as a hostess’s.
She looked at me once more. “Ten days,” she mouthed, and was gone across the lawn before I could ask what she meant.
I pressed myself into the shadow of the shed as Victoria stepped out onto the porch in a silk robe, scanning the yard the way you’d scan a room for a moth that had gotten in — mildly irritated, entirely certain she’d find it.
