The next three days, I barely slept.
I called out of two shifts. Mark came by with coffee and told me I looked like hell.
“Because I am hell,” I said.
I laid everything from the box across the dining room table.
Mark pointed out that the man in the suit had a business card clipped to the back of the photo.
Reeves and Associates, Estate Planning.
I barely slept.
***
I drove there the following morning.
The soft-spoken man, David, was a lawyer who met me in his office. I slid the photo across his desk.
“I need to know what my daughter has been doing with you.”
He studied me for a long moment.
“Sir, I can’t share the specifics of a client’s file. But I can tell you this. Whatever you think you’re looking at, you’re wrong. Go home. Talk to her.”
I slid the photo across his desk.
“Somebody sent me a package designed to make me hate her. I want to know who.”
David hesitated.
“I can’t confirm anything. But a woman came in a few weeks back, claiming to be a relative and asking about your daughter’s family paperwork. We turned her away at the front desk. Lily happened to be sitting in our waiting area at the time.”
I frowned.
“I want to know who.”
“I’d bet money that’s how the woman knew to come back and watch for her next appointment. She showed up again the following week, made a scene, and my paralegal caught her photographing pages from a file cart on her way out. We had to change the door codes. And the note you mentioned in that package, I’ve got a threatening letter in my drawer that might match it.”
“Did she leave a name?”
“Jillian.”
“We had to change the door codes.”
The name meant nothing at first. Then it clicked.
Lily had mentioned her once, months back, a woman claiming to be a distant cousin of her birth mother.
My daughter told me she’d shut the conversation down. I had barely registered it.
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