“It’s just a temporary measure, Rosalie,” Christopher had murmured, leaning over my hospital bed, his voice warm and reasonable.

“So I can manage things while you sleep.

That’s all.”

“You expect me,” I had said, pushing his hand away from the pen, “to sign legal documents surrendering my estate while I’m this heavily medicated?”

He had smiled, and told me I was overthinking it, and I had recognized, even through the anesthesia fog, the specific feeling of a trap being held open for me — patiently, lovingly, by a hand I had held at the altar.

Chapter 3 — Never Sign What You Haven’t Read

There is a reason I did not sign, and it is the same reason my family had always found me so inconveniently hard to manage.

My grandmother had left me a thriving interior design firm, built by her own hands over a lifetime, and along with it she had left me an education in how the world actually takes things from people.

Years of managing contracts, invoices, vendor disputes, and property deeds had drilled one rule into me so deeply it had become a reflex: you never, ever put your name on a document you have not read, no matter who is holding the pen, no matter how much they love you, and most especially not when they are in a hurry.

“If these papers are as routine as you say,” I had told Christopher in the hospital, breathing carefully against a wave of nausea, “then there’s no harm in emailing them to Jacqueline first.”

Christopher had gone tense at the name.

Jacqueline Vance was my attorney — a sharp, unhurried woman who had handled commercial transactions for my firm for years, and who had one professional habit that Beatrice absolutely could not stand: she read every single paragraph of every document aloud before she would let me sign it.

“There’s no reason to drag a lawyer into a simple family matter,” Christopher had said, his voice tightening.

“There is every reason in the world,” I had answered, “when the family matter is you asking me to sign away my financial rights.” And that, more than anything, is why the folder came home from the hospital in my discharge bag, and why Beatrice was standing over me eleven minutes later, holding it in my face.