Lila

Chapter 2: The Foundation

The boardroom was on the fourth floor of an office building in a town I had visited exactly once, for a wedding that ended badly. The suite had been converted from an old bank, and the vault door still hung on the wall like a decoration, brass and useless. I sat at the far end of a table that seated twelve and counted the empty chairs.

Blair sat at the head. She had on the same navy suit. She had on my pearl earrings. I noticed that before I noticed anything else, before the lawyer spread his papers, before the other three trustees introduced themselves with names I would forget. Gold posts. Small and bright against her hair.

"Miss Lila," the lawyer said. "Thank you for coming. I understand this is unusual."

"I have the letter," I said. "The one from the drawer."

Blair's hand paused over her pen. It was the smallest movement, a hitch of a quarter inch, but I had spent two decades reading her smallest movements. She had not known about the second letter. Our mother had kept one secret from her firstborn, and I had found it, and now I was the one holding the advantage.

"The trust charter," the lawyer went on, "allows the donor to designate a successor trustee by private instrument. Your mother executed such an instrument. There are two versions. The first names Blair. The second names Lila."

"Both can't stand," said one of the trustees, a woman with silver hair and a wedding band thick as a rope. "Which is later?"

"The second," I said.

"The second is dated later," the lawyer agreed. "But it was witnessed by the donor's daughter, which raises a question of undue influence."

I felt the room tilt. I had signed as a witness. I had signed as a witness to my own inheritance, and Blair had known that when she stood in my kitchen. That was why she had brought the folder. That was why she had shown me the first letter and pocketed the second fact, the fact that would make my claim look like a scheme.

"She didn't tell me what it was," I said. "I signed a sealed envelope."

"You expect the board to take your word," Blair said, and her voice was calm, almost kind. "You, who still lives in her house. You, who drove her to every appointment. You, who was there at the end."

The room went quiet. There it was, the thing none of us had said since the funeral. I had been there at the end. Blair had been on a call.

"I was there because someone had to be," I said. "You were busy. You were always busy."

"I was building this," Blair said, and gestured at the vault door, the table, the charter. "Every dollar I raised, every grant, every audit I passed. This foundation is my life's work. You want to take it because you were in the room when she died?"

"I want to take it because she asked me to."

We looked at each other down the length of the table. The silver-haired trustee cleared her throat and said we would reconvene in two weeks, that the lawyer would review the witness question, that in the meantime the trust would continue to operate under its current structure. Blair's structure. Blair's grants. Blair's signature on every check.

Walking out, I passed the vault door and stopped.

"Your earrings," I said. "Those are mine."

Blair touched her earlobe. "They were in my box this morning."

"They've always been in your box," I said. "Because you always take mine."

She did not answer. She walked to the elevator and pressed the button and did not look at me, and I stood by the useless vault holding a letter in my bag that might save me or bury me, depending on which of us the board decided to believe.

*****

The lawyer called me that evening. He said the board had questions about my mother's state of mind in the final months. He said Blair had submitted a medical record. He said I should consider retaining my own counsel.

I sat on the kitchen floor with the phone against my ear and the lemon soap smell all around me and understood that my sister had not come home to warn me. She had come home to build a case.

The second version of the letter, the one with my name, had a date. The date was the same day our mother had signed a change to her medication. Blair would use that. She would say our mother was not herself. She would say I had taken advantage of a sick woman in her own house, and the house was mine, and the sick woman was mine, and every advantage I had ever had in this family would become the evidence against me.

I hung up and looked at the letter in my bag. Then I did what I always did when the family closed in around me. I started cleaning, because it was the only thing I was good at, and because I needed to think.