Chapter 10
The corridor outside the courtroom was wide, lined with tall marble pillars and echoes of distant footsteps.
Thomas and I walked out side by side, but before we could reach the brass elevators, the heavy double doors of the courtroom burst open behind us.
"Margaret!"
Michael came storming down the hall, his face contorted with rage, Jennifer and Lisa trailing close behind him. Bradley Vance was nowhere to be seen; he had already gathered his briefcase and slipped down a side stairwell, leaving his clients to face the wreckage alone.
David, who had been waiting in the hallway in plain clothes, immediately stepped between Michael and me, his posture solid as granite.
"Step back, sir," David warned quietly.
"Get out of my way!" Michael snarled, trying to look around David’s shoulder at me. "Mom! Are you completely out of your mind?! Do you have any idea what you just did?! You gave away our future! Everything Dad worked for! Everything we were supposed to inherit! You threw it away to a bunch of strangers!"
I stopped. I turned around slowly.
I looked at Michael. He was forty-two years old, an executive at a software firm, wearing an eight-hundred-dollar jacket, screaming in a public hallway because his seventy-two-year-old mother refused to die and hand him a check.
"Your father worked for forty years to provide for his family," I said, each word deliberate and steady. "He did not work so his children could abandon his widow the moment she became inconvenient."
"We didn't abandon you!" Jennifer cried out, stepping up beside Michael, her tears running through her makeup. "We were busy, Mom! We have mortgages! We have private school tuition for the kids! Do you know what Greg’s firm is going through right now? Do you know how much debt Michael is carrying from his business expansion? We needed that money! We were counting on it!"
There it was.
The raw, ugly truth, stripped of all its pious rationalizations.
They hadn't just expected my death; they had budgeted for it. They had leveraged their own reckless lifestyles against the timeline of my heart failure.
"You counted on my grave," I said softly.
The hallway went dead quiet. Lisa flinched as if I had struck her across the face.
"You didn't call to ask how my heart was," I continued, looking directly into Jennifer’s wide eyes. "You called to ask about the life insurance. You didn't suggest a senior home because you were worried about my stairs; you suggested it because you wanted the house on the market before the spring real estate rush. You treated my life like an obstacle between you and a bank account."