“I can show you around the winery and introduce you to the folks tomorrow,” Kant said. “I imagine you’ll want to spend tonight getting reacquainted with your house.”

She could feel it at her back, this sprawling monster of a home, rooms stretching in every direction, all of it foreign, all of it supposedly hers now.

“You’ll have questions,” Kant repeated. “I can’t guarantee that I’ll always have the answers, but I’ll do my best for you.”

“Please.” The coffee was cooling. Margot couldn’t bring herself to drink it. Her question, the most important question, had stuck in her throat so long that she felt like she would choke if it stayed there another moment. “How did my parents die?”

4

The light from the window came in at a sharp angle, highlighting the creases and weathered pocks across Kant’s face. Some unreadable emotion moved behind his eyes, then was gone again.

“What did Walter tell you?” he asked.

The mortuary owner’s words had been hushed and bordering on apologetic. Margot fixed her eyes on the table as she tried not to let frustration bleed into her voice. “He said they both had heart attacks while they slept. That it was a fluke that they happened on the same night.”

“That’s what he told me too.”

Margot swallowed and tasted a bitter, stringy flavor at the back of her throat. At least she hadn’t been the only person given that story. And based on the edge to Kant’s voice, she wasn’t the only one to be dissatisfied with it either.

At the time, she’d thought the funeral director must have been hiding something from her, some real cause of death that, for one reason or another, he’d thought would be too distressing to share with Margot.

Now, though, she wasn’t so sure. There had been a hesitancy in the director’s voice that made her think that he was at a loss to fully explain what had happened—that he was trying to convince himself as much as Margot.

Kant took up his mug, his eyes downcast. “I was the one who found them.”

Margot’s heart thumped. She leaned forward, a slick kind of dread pooling deep in her stomach.

He was there. He saw them.

“What happened?”

“They hadn’t shown up that morning, so I came into the house.” Kant tilted his head toward the hallway. His voice dropped until the rattling windows and tight whistle of wind forcing its way through narrow cracks nearly drowned out his words. “I called but didn’t get an answer. Went upstairs. Found them in their room. In bed, on their backs. They…must have passed in their sleep.”

That last part was a lie. Margot didn’t doubt her parents had been in bed, but they couldn’t have been asleep when they died. Not after what she saw in the brief viewing that morning.