Chapter 4
The morning of the funeral, Rosa tried one more time.
She found the family lawyer, a thin, unhurried man named Preston Wall, adjusting his cufflinks in the funeral parlor's small side office before the service began. She'd never spoken to him directly before — he was a voice on the phone during estate meetings, a signature at the bottom of documents Gerald handed her to witness without explanation — but she was out of people to try.
"I need to show you something," she said, and pulled the folded note from her pocket with fingers that wouldn't quite hold steady.
Preston Wall read it. His face didn't change much, which told Rosa more than any reaction would have. "Where did you find this?"
"Under her mattress. Two nights ago."
"And you're telling me this now, the morning of her funeral."
"I tried to tell her sister. I tried to call the police. I don't know who else—"
"Ms. Delgado." He folded the note back along its original creases, unhurried, and held it out to her rather than keeping it, which struck her later as the moment she should have understood exactly whose side he was on. "Grief does strange things to people's imaginations. A four-word note with no context isn't evidence of anything except that Eleanor may have had a disagreement with her doctor at some point. I'd advise you to keep this to yourself today, for everyone's sake — including your own."
*Including your own.* The same phrase, almost word for word, that Gerald had used a week earlier when the conversation had drifted, briefly, dangerously, toward the subject of Mateo's upcoming procedure and what might happen to the family's coverage of it "if there were ever any... complications... in the household."
She'd walked out of that office with the note back in her pocket and something new sitting in her chest alongside the fear — something harder, something that felt less like panic and more like resolve.
The service began at eleven. Rosa took her position near the back, ostensibly to help direct latecomers to open seats, actually because it kept her near the side aisle, near the little glass case with its coiled hose and red-handled axe, though she could not have said, in that moment, what she thought she might do with either.
Dr. Fenwick arrived late and pale, taking up his position near the side door rather than beside the family. At one point, as guests were still filing in, Rosa saw Gerald cross the room to him. She was too far away to hear words, but she watched Fenwick's hands — how they moved when he spoke, quick and defensive, how Gerald's jaw tightened in response, how Fenwick glanced once, involuntarily, toward the coffin at the front of the room, the way a man glances at something he's afraid of rather than something he's mourning.
"The dosage was supposed to have worn off by now," she heard Fenwick say, low and urgent, as Gerald turned to walk away — six words, carried across ten feet of hushed, lily-scented air by some trick of the room's acoustics, landing in Rosa's chest like a stone dropped into still water.
*Worn off.*
May you like
Not administered. Not prescribed. *Worn off* — as though whatever had been given to Eleanor Whitfield was a thing with a timer on it, a thing that was supposed to end, that was, perhaps, taking longer to end than two men standing near a coffin had planned for.
Rosa did not remember deciding to walk toward the wall case. She only remembered, later, the cold of the glass beneath her palm, and the sudden, absolute clarity of understanding that no one else in that room was going to move.
