She swallowed, like her throat had become too small. Tears gathered but didn’t fall yet, as if she was trying to be brave and failing by inches.
“I heard Grandma talking last night,” she whispered.
I felt a cold thread move through my stomach. “Talking to who?”
“On the phone,” Sophie said. “Late. After you went to bed.”
I stared at her, my mind trying to make a harmless story out of it. Margaret on a late call with a friend. Margaret gossiping. Margaret discussing her retreat. Margaret complaining about me. None of those would make Sophie look like this.
“What did you hear?” I asked carefully.
Sophie looked down at her hands, then back up at me like she was asking permission to break something fragile.
“She was talking about money,” Sophie said. “A lot of money.”
My throat went dry. Margaret and money—nothing new. She liked security. She liked control. She’d always managed our social calendar and our home like a kingdom. But money wasn’t usually secret between us. Or so I thought.
Sophie’s voice dropped even lower. “She said… ‘Once he’s gone, everything will be mine.’”
I didn’t breathe.
Sophie’s eyes brimmed. “And then she said she’d make it look natural. And no one would suspect anything.”
The steering wheel felt slick under my palms, like my skin had forgotten how to grip.
“Sophie,” I said, forcing air into my lungs, “are you absolutely sure that’s what you heard?”
Tears slid down her cheeks. “Yes. Grandpa, I’m sure.”
Her voice wobbled. “And she laughed. It was… it was a horrible laugh. She said… ‘The old fool won’t know what hit him.’”
For a moment, I could only hear the airport noise through the cracked window: luggage wheels, distant announcements, car engines. My mind tried to reject what Sophie was saying the way the body rejects poison.
