Rebecca had several heavily burdened credit cards hidden behind minimum payments. And they kept spending — restaurants, vacations, clothes, handbags, private school — while the gap between their image and their finances vanished.

They are going under, Eleanor wrote. Birchwood will look to them like a rope. Do not let them tie it around your neck.

The third letter waited in a safe-deposit box at Caroline Briggs’s office. I sat across from her in a leather chair while she laid a thick folder on the desk between us.

“Your sister anticipated pressure,” she said.

“That sounds like Eleanor.”

“She took legal steps.”