Chapter 15 — The Clause

I stared at the black screen of my phone, and the last piece dropped into place.

My grandfather’s trust — the one I had inherited three years earlier — held a clause I had barely registered when I signed it: on my death, my private real estate holdings would merge automatically into my husband’s family estate, with control defaulting to Darius, and through him to his legal power of attorney.

Ottoline.

She had not been poisoning me out of some private dislike.

She had been eroding my health on a schedule, building the medical record of a slow “autoimmune failure,” so that when I finally died there would be a tidy diagnosis and no suspicion at all — and the estate would come home to her bloodline.