My stepmother called me at Fort Sill to say she was taking my dead mother’s $2.4 million trust for Tiffany’s Nantucket wedding

I was reviewing a training packet when my phone lit up.

Janet.

For half a second, I considered letting it go to voicemail.

Then I thought of my father. Of the Charleston house. Of the emails from Margaret Avery, my mother’s trust attorney. Of the six months of pressure, excuses, and polite little attempts to bleed money from a trust Janet had no right to touch.

So I answered.

“Rose,” Janet said, her voice sliding through the phone like warm syrup over broken glass. “Darling.”

Nobody who actually loves you uses darling that way.

“What do you need, Janet?”