The funeral lilies were still wilting in their crystal vases when my mother-in-law destroyed my world with six words. “Pack your things and get out.”
Eleanor Sullivan stood in the doorway of what had been my home for fifteen years, her black Chanel suit pristine despite the October rain, her silver hair pulled back in that austere chignon she wore to every family gathering where she’d made clear I would never be good enough for her son. But James was three days buried, and whatever mask she’d worn for his sake had finally slipped.
“I’m sorry?” I looked up from sympathy cards scattered across the mahogany dining table where James and I had shared thousands of meals.
“Eleanor, I don’t understand.”
Her smile was sharp as winter. “James is gone, Catherine, which means you’re no longer under his protection.”
The words hit like a physical blow.
Protection—as if loving her son had been some elaborate con game, as if the fifteen years I’d spent caring for him through cancer treatments and remissions and that final devastating relapse had been calculated manipulation rather than devotion. “This is my home,” I said quietly, though even as I spoke, the words felt hollow.
I was sixty-two, a recently retired nurse who’d spent her career savings helping pay for James’s experimental treatments.
What claim did I really have to this sprawling Georgian mansion in Greenwich? Eleanor laughed, the sound like glass breaking. “Your home?
Oh Catherine, you really haven’t been paying attention.” She walked to James’s grandmother’s antique secretary desk and pulled out a manila folder with the efficiency of someone who’d been planning this moment for years.
“The house is in James’s name. As are all the investment accounts, the stock portfolio, the real estate holdings.” She spread papers across the table like a dealer revealing a winning hand.
“Did you really think my son would leave his family’s fortune to a nobody nurse he picked up at a hospital?”
My legs gave out. I sank into the chair where I’d sat just a week ago, watching James pick at soup, both of us pretending he might have strength to finish it.
“James would never—”
“James was a Sullivan.
We don’t throw away forty years of careful wealth building on sentimental gestures.” Eleanor leaned forward, close enough that I could smell her expensive perfume mixed with satisfaction. “He left everything to me, as was proper. The house, the businesses, the thirty-three million in liquid assets.
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