My heart, already battered by the day, constricted.
“Hey, sweetheart,” I said, putting the call on speaker so Teresa could hear in case it mattered.
“Mom,” Sophie said, her voice tight with a mixture of anger and confusion. “Why didn’t you tell me Dad had some secret mountain property? I just got a call from Uncle Victor. He says you’re up there and you’re… confused. That we should all be working together to make sure the inheritance is handled fairly. He suggested we meet tomorrow with some investors. He said if I sign a few papers, it’ll help secure my future. What is happening?”
Teresa’s lips thinned. “They move fast,” she muttered.
“Sophie, listen to me,” I said, my voice sharper than I intended. “Do not sign anything. Do not meet them alone. Do you understand?”
“Mom,” she protested. “If there’s a lot of money involved, don’t I at least have a right to know what’s going on? I’m not a kid anymore.”
“You absolutely have a right to know,” I said, forcing myself to lower my tone. “And I will tell you everything. I promise. But your uncles are not acting in your best interest. They are trying to use you to get to this property. Your father knew this might happen. He left messages for both of us. I need you to trust me for twenty-four hours. Can you do that?”
There was a pause. I could almost hear her thinking, could picture her pacing in her small off-campus apartment, her hair twisted around one finger, biting her lip.
“Twenty-four hours,” she said finally. “Then we talk. All of it. No more secrets.”
“No more secrets,” I agreed, the words tasting both heavy and necessary.
“How I want to play this,” I echoed, glancing around the room. Maps, files, evidence. It felt like stepping into the middle of a chess game where half the pieces had already been moved by someone else. “I’m not a strategist. I’m a scientist. A teacher.”
“Then treat it like research,” Teresa said. “You have data. Use it.”
Despite everything, a small, fierce smile tugged at the corner of my mouth.
Michael had always said that about my work. “You see patterns other people miss,” he’d told me once, when I’d stayed up all night analyzing a dataset. “That’s your superpower.”
Maybe it was time to apply that to more than the flowering cycles of rare plants.
The next day, I met Sophie at a small café in town—a neutral ground halfway between her campus and the mountain.
She arrived five minutes late, which was early by her standards, walking in with her bag slung over one shoulder, her brow furrowed. She spotted me immediately and crossed the room, dropping into the seat across from me.
Her eyes—Michael’s eyes, the same shade of warm brown—were wary.
“Okay,” she said, pushing her hair back. “I’m here. Talk.”
I looked at her, really looked at her, and the weight of what I was about to say settled on me like a physical thing. Sophie had always been perceptive. She’d suspected for a long time that there were things Michael wasn’t telling us, particularly toward the end when he’d grown more introspective, more distant in a way that wasn’t entirely attributable to illness.
“You know how Dad came from money,” I began. “At least, more money than we ever had.”
She rolled her eyes slightly. “Please. The stories about Grandpa’s company and the estate were like family myths. The Great Quinn Fortune.”
“Right,” I said. “What you don’t know is that when your grandparents died, your father’s share of that fortune was… stolen, essentially.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“Your uncles forged documents,” I said simply. There was no point sugarcoating. “They diverted assets that should have gone to your father into their own accounts, using shell companies and fraudulent filings. When your father discovered it and threatened to take it to court, they made his life very difficult. They tried to ruin his reputation, professionally and personally. He walked away for his own sanity. He married me. He started over.”
