Chapter 4

The stone shed had a gap at the roofline where you could hear the yard. I stood in it with my back against the block and listened, because Dru had walked out to the drive to take a call, and Dru never walked out to the drive.

"-clean title by Friday," she was saying. "The trust's paperwork is the only snag, and I've got that handled."

A man's voice on the other end, tinny. I caught the word "Reeve." Harlan Reeve, the developer from Rutland who'd been sniffing around since December.

Dru laughed. "No, no. My son's been managing the operation, but he's not on the deed. He's never been on the deed. My mother-in-law's trust controls everything."

Then, lower: "If it comes apart, it was Cole's idea. All of it. He's the one who's been handling the medications and the paperwork. I'm just the mother who tried to help."

I put my hand over my mouth.

The shed's steel door was propped with a brick. I went in and stood between the pallets in the dark and tried to breathe.

I'd thought Cole was the mastermind. That's what I want to say now, because it's the truth and it's embarrassing: I'd spent eight months believing my husband was the danger and his mother was just a woman with too much time and a tote bag full of opinions.

But she'd said it out loud. If it comes apart, it was Cole's idea.

She was going to let them take him.

I waited until her Subaru door closed and the engine started, and then I went back to the office, because I had left the printer page and I wanted the rest of it.

The office door was unlocked. The tote bag was on the desk.

I don't know why she left it. Maybe she thought she'd be right back. Maybe she just wasn't afraid of me, which was its own kind of insult.

I opened it.

Commitment papers. Two copies. My name at the top, Wren Elizabeth Alcott, and a line for my signature, and my signature already there, in blue ink, in handwriting that was mine the way a font is mine-close enough to fool a clerk, wrong in the loops.

Under that, a sale contract. Alcott Stone Trust to Slate Ridge Holdings, LLC. Initials at the bottom: W.A.

I knew the LLC. I'd filed the annual report in January. Dru had told me it was her "retirement vehicle," a holding company she'd set up with her sister's address in Florida, and I'd typed the registered agent's name myself.

Payout clause, Section 9. Proceeds to Slate Ridge Holdings, LLC, upon closing. Sole beneficiary.

Not Cole. Never Cole.

I stood there in the cold office with her papers in my hands and understood, finally, the shape of the thing: she was going to sell Mamie's quarry, put me in a ward, and let her son go to prison for it.

The office door opened.

Dru stood in the doorway with her keys in her hand. She looked at the tote, open on the desk. She looked at the papers in my hands.

For a second her face did nothing at all. Then it did the thing it always did, the smile, the tilt of the head.

"Well," she said. "That's a shame."