True Heiress Never Lies! novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Dawn on the Lawn

My father read the paper twice.

It was a form, two pages, with a lawyer's letterhead.

At the bottom were his signature and the date.

"I signed a stack that week," he said hoarsely.

"You put a stack in front of me. I was sitting in the hall of the courthouse."

"You signed it."

"You said it was for her school forms."

"Gordon, it's your signature."

"It's a form for a placement you chose without me, in a place you chose without me. I'm revoking it."

"You can't revoke a medical consent without the facility's agreement."

"Then I'll get a lawyer who knows how."

"At three in the morning."

"I'll start at three in the morning."

Estelle tilted her head.

She did not look scared.

She looked like a woman moving a chess piece she'd moved before.

"It's a lovely facility, I'm told," she said. "Out in the country. No cold rooms."

My father's hand clenched on the paper until it tore.

"Get out of my house," he said.

"It's my house, too."

"Get out."

She looked at me.

"You could have taken the six months, Sonia," she said, very gently. "We could all have been home by spring."

Then she walked down the hall and out the front door without a sound.

I did not sleep.

None of us did.

My grandmother made coffee at four.

Peter woke and refused to leave my side, so he sat on the kitchen counter in his pajamas, swinging his feet.

My father paced.

At five-forty I was standing in the front hall in my mother's old cardigan, with the cardboard backing of the Bible under my arm.

My grandmother stood to my right and my father on my left.

Peter was on the stairs in his socks.

"They'll come at six," I said.

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