Chapter 1
The lilies smelled wrong.
Rosa Delgado had arranged flowers in the Whitfield house for six years — birthday bouquets, anniversary roses, the enormous Christmas arrangements Eleanor insisted on every December even though half the blooms wilted before anyone saw them. She knew what real flowers smelled like in that house. These, banked in tall vases around a closed white coffin in the front room of Callahan & Sons Funeral Parlor, smelled like nothing at all. Refrigerated. Rushed.
Everything about the last three days had been rushed.
She stood near the back of the receiving room in her orange uniform because she hadn't had time to change, because Gerald Whitfield had called her at six that morning and told her the car was leaving for the service at nine and she was expected to help seat guests, and somewhere between the phone call and now she'd forgotten that grief was supposed to look different from this — this hollow, adrenaline-shot alertness that kept her eyes moving over every face in the room instead of resting on the coffin the way everyone else's did.
Eleanor Whitfield had collapsed on a Tuesday evening after dinner. By Wednesday morning Dr. Simon Fenwick had signed a certificate citing sudden cardiac arrest. By Wednesday afternoon, Gerald had chosen a casket, closed to viewing, "for Eleanor's dignity," he'd said, his voice perfectly level. By Thursday, the funeral was scheduled. Today was Saturday. Four days from a woman standing in her kitchen asking Rosa if the roses needed more water, to a sealed white box on a draped bier with an organist warming up somewhere behind a velvet curtain.
Rosa had asked, twice, if there would be an autopsy. Gerald had looked at her the second time with an expression she'd never seen on him before — not grief, something colder — and said, "Why would there be an autopsy, Rosa? The doctor was very clear."
She hadn't asked a third time. She needed this job. Her son Mateo had a congenital heart defect that required a procedure the Whitfield family's insurance plan covered and her own never would, and Gerald had made sure, more than once, in more than one conversation, that she understood exactly how connected those two facts were.
But Eleanor had been fine. Not sick-fine, not fragile-fine — actually fine. Two weeks ago she'd walked the whole length of the garden with Rosa, laughing about the neighbor's dog digging up the tulip bulbs again. She'd talked about repainting the sunroom. People planning to repaint sunrooms did not drop dead of cardiac arrest four days later without so much as a headache in between.
Rosa scanned the room again. Eleanor's sister, Camille, sat rigid in the second row, dabbing at dry eyes with a handkerchief she wasn't using. Dr. Fenwick stood near the side door instead of sitting with the family, his hands folded in front of him like a man waiting to be excused. And Gerald — Gerald sat in the front pew beside an empty space where Eleanor's mother would have sat, if Eleanor's mother were still alive to grieve a daughter dying so precisely on schedule.
The organist began to play. Guests filed toward their seats. Rosa found herself moving instead toward the side aisle, toward the little glass case mounted on the wall that held a coiled fire hose and a red-handled axe behind a placard that read IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. She didn't remember deciding to walk there. Her feet simply carried her, the way they had three nights ago when she'd found herself standing outside Eleanor's bedroom door at two in the morning for no reason she could name.
That night, she'd gone in. Just to sit with the silence of the room, she told herself. Eleanor's reading glasses were still on the nightstand, folded neatly the way she always left them. Her tea, gone cold, sat half-finished beside them — cold because Eleanor collapsed before she could finish it, everyone assumed, though no one had asked why a woman having a heart attack would have calmly set down her cup first.
Rosa had almost left. Then her hand, moving on its own, had slid beneath the edge of the mattress, and found a folded square of paper tucked there like something hidden from a child, or a husband.
She had read it eleven times since. She had it in her uniform pocket now, worn soft at the folds.
May you like
Four words in Eleanor's careful handwriting: *Don't trust Simon. Don't sign.*
The organ swelled. The priest cleared his throat at the front of the room. And Rosa stood at the edge of the aisle with her hand resting flat against the cool glass of the emergency case, staring at the white coffin, thinking about a woman who had planned to repaint a sunroom, and could not make herself sit down.
