Chapter 4

The next four days taught me how much of the law is really just waiting.

Sills claimed I had never given him anything. The guardianship petition was filed on the fourth day; a judge signed a temporary order; I was assigned a court attorney who was twenty-six and scared of my husband's name. I slept on Tessa's aunt's couch in the village and ate soup and answered questions about my childhood that I could not always answer.

On the tenth day we went to court.

The hearing room smelled of radiator dust and wet coats. Grant wore charcoal with the mourning pin at his collar and sat with his hands folded like a man at a funeral he had organized. Celia sat behind him in gray gloves, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, and twice she turned to the gallery as if to share a private grief.

Dr. Pell took the stand first. Chronic confabulation, he said. Identification with a deceased public figure. A "sad and persistent delusion." He recommended permanent guardianship.

My court attorney asked for a recess he knew we would not get.

"Dr. Pell," I said, standing before the judge had told me to sit. "You wrote 'confabulation consistent with grief' in your first report. Those were Grant's words, weren't they. He gave them to you in the library last March. He said: if she starts telling the river story, write that, and I'll have the order in nine days."

The room went very still.

"Because I was dusting behind the library door," I said. "In a gray dress. And nobody in that house has ever looked at me."

The judge looked at Dr. Pell. Dr. Pell looked at Grant. Grant looked at the table.

I put the photocopy of my father's will in front of the bench. Tessa had run it off on the manor's own copier the night before I handed the original to Warren Sills, and the copier logs the date, and Tessa signed an affidavit that she watched it come out. The original was "misplaced," Sills said. His voice had gone thin and high.

The judge ordered a DNA test and an independent evaluation, and suspended the temporary guardianship. "If she is who she says she is," he said, "she has been living in that house as a servant for two years, and I would like to know how."

In the corridor afterward, Celia caught my arm. She smelled like my mother's perfume, the bottle I thought had been thrown out.

"You poor thing," she said softly. "You must be so tired."

She handed me a glass of water from the cooler. I watched a white tablet go down in it, fizzing a thin line of bubbles up the inside of the glass.