“Is this about the estate?” I asked. “His children can have the money, the furniture, everything. I never married him for that.”
Mr. Grant looked troubled. “Margaret, all three have filed lawsuits challenging your marriage. They claim their father was incompetent and that you manipulated him.”
“He beat me at chess three nights before he died.”
“I have the evaluations proving he was lucid,” he replied, sliding the envelope toward me. “But this contains something else—a confession and instructions. Please sit down before you read it.”
Part 2: The Photograph in the Envelope
Inside were a handwritten letter and a faded photograph taken forty-five years earlier. It showed a young Walter outside a municipal building in Chicago, standing with a dark-haired woman and a little girl in a yellow raincoat.
The woman was not Diana, his late wife. The child held a tiny red doll identical to one from my childhood—the doll I had buried beneath a willow tree when I was seven, after my mother disappeared.
