Sophie drifted in behind her, hoodie up, eyes scanning corners as if the house still contained echoes. Even months after the arrest, she moved differently here—careful, alert. Her body remembered.
Catherine set the grocery bags down and said, “First, you’re coming with me to cardiology. Second, you’re meeting with Sharon about the estate. Third, we’re throwing out every pill bottle in this house that wasn’t prescribed directly by a hospital pharmacist.”
I opened my mouth to argue, then shut it. I’d spent too long being the one who decided what was “reasonable.” Reasonable nearly killed me.
In the cardiologist’s office, the doctor spoke in a calm voice that didn’t soften the facts. My heart had been stressed. Not destroyed, not irreparable, but harmed. Repeated digoxin exposure had pushed me toward the edge.
“You’re lucky,” he said, flipping through test results.
Lucky. That word made me feel sick. Luck implies randomness. What happened to me wasn’t random. It was planned.
Sharon met us that afternoon. She wasn’t my divorce lawyer; she’d become something closer to a guardian of my boundaries. She sat at my dining table with a stack of documents and said, “Margaret’s criminal case is the loud part. The quiet part is what she set in motion legally before she got caught.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Sharon slid a folder toward me. Inside were copies of paperwork Margaret had filed while still married to me.
A will update request, unsigned but drafted.
A beneficiary change form for a small policy I’d forgotten existed.
A power of attorney template with my name typed neatly at the top and a signature line that made my skin crawl.
“She was preparing,” Sharon said, voice flat. “Not just to kill you. To control the aftermath.”
Catherine’s hand clenched on her coffee mug. “Can she do anything from prison?”
“She can try,” Sharon replied. “But we’re going to block every route.”
It turned out the Fairmont wasn’t the only place Margaret had staged a performance. She’d also staged a paper trail, one designed to make her look like the grieving widow even before I became one.