Chapter 17: The Original

Gabe's POV

The lawyer lived in a yellow house outside Mount Vernon with a bird feeder on the porch.

He was eighty-one years old and he opened the door himself, leaning on a cane.

"You have your father's chin," he said. "Come in before she thinks of sending someone."

"Who?"

"The woman who phoned me at seven this morning."

The front room smelled of pipe smoke and old paper.

He lowered himself into a chair and pointed me to the couch.

"I drew up Harold's will in the fall," he said. "Eleven years ago this month. He sat where you are."

"I know the date. I buried him that winter."

"Then you know what I'm going to say. The will she filed was not the one I drew up."

"A copy reached me after the funeral, with his name on it, and I said nothing."

"Why?"

He looked at his hands.

"Because her lawyer called me, and he knew I had a license and a daughter."

"I told myself the old man might have changed his mind."

"He couldn't hold a pen."

"I know that now. I knew it then, if I'm honest."

He put the cane across his knees and looked at me hard.

"I watched a young woman take a microphone out of that woman's hand on the internet last night."

"My granddaughter showed me. I haven't slept since."

I said nothing.

I was thinking of Claire on that stage in a black server's uniform, saying her name and her shift.

"Come with me," the lawyer said.

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