That was the scheme.

The soup and the coffee were for me; the campaign against Emily was the real work, the load-bearing wall of the whole plan, because Rebecca understood something I had forgotten in my loneliness — that the last line of defense around an old man’s fortune is usually his children, and that if you want to empty the house you first have to get the daughter locked outside it.

She nearly did.

She got Emily so far outside that my own child feared to knock.