Four months after Alma graduated from law school her beloved mentor suffered rapid-onset dementia and was put in Longwood’s MCU under the kind auspices of Wanda Lopez. Six weeks later he was dead, and the newly minted Alma inherited a lucrative law practice. A branch of law that specializes in the knowledge of precisely who will benefit from the death of whom.

The skin on the top of Rose’s head creeps as the hairs try to stand on end beneath the wig. She needs to leave this office. She sets her teacup down on the desk. First she needs to use the restroom.

Returning, she is girded for battle; no argument, she is walking out regardless of how the will is situated. Striding into the office, she doesn’t sit down. “I’m sorry,” she begins.

“We’re all done,” Alma announces with a bright smile, as she moves her phone off a folder. “Bet you thought you’d die before we finished your will.”

Rose smiles. “It did cross my mind.”

“No one dies until after Greene and Associates finishes the will. Company policy.” Alma rises from her chair and hands Rose her copy of the papers in a thick creamy folder embossed with the firm’s name. Rounding the desk, she retrieves Rose’s clutch, tucks it under Rose’s arm, and walks her to the elevator, evidently as anxious to have her go as she was to have her stay five minutes before.

Rose wants out badly enough that she doesn’t even start an argument about taking the stairs.

The elevator arrives. “You’re the last out tonight,” Alma says as Rose steps into the elevator.

CHAPTER 29

The elevator is small and old, probably installed when the house was a home. It is also slow. Though the descent is no more than fifteen feet, it inches and creaks along like an old man afraid of falling. Usually, Rose would suffer a few pangs of claustrophobia. Today her mind is such a tangle of thoughts, reality is as inaccessible as Sleeping Beauty’s castle before the lawn boy came.

Alma stirred up countless memory fragments from a life Rose hasn’t visited since she first became aware of the fog machine installed in her skull—a machine that still periodically manages an obscuring puff. Drugs don’t clear out immediately, nor without leaving residue. In the old days, it manifested as flashbacks. This time around, it manifests as confusion.

You’re the last out tonight, Alma said.

Rose suffers a disorienting sense that a memory, a name, is teetering on the edge of her mind, an important revelation on the tip of her tongue.