At 6:30 on a freezing Thursday morning, my sister called to tell me our father was dead.
There was just one problem.
Dad sat three feet away from me in a navy flannel robe, sipping coffee and stealing bacon off my plate.
I looked at the name glowing across my phone.
Vanessa Cole.
My older sister treated mornings like a personal enemy, so a call before sunrise usually meant someone had been seriously hurt.
I never imagined she’d be reporting a death that hadn’t happened.
Dad reached over and stole another strip of bacon.
“What?” he whispered.
I answered the call.
“Vanessa?”
For a couple of seconds, all I heard was a car engine and a clicking turn signal.
Then she said flatly,
“Natalie, Dad died last night.”
Dad stopped chewing.
I slowly turned toward him.
He looked right back at me.
I tapped speaker.
“When?”
“Sometime overnight. Harold found him.”
That choice of name was deliberate.
Harold Pike had been Dad’s closest friend for four decades and had once owned the local funeral home. If Vanessa wanted the story to sound believable, Harold was exactly who she’d use.
“What happened?” I asked.
Vanessa sighed.
“Does it matter? He’s gone.”
Dad’s expression hardened.
She continued.
“Grant and I are taking care of everything. Don’t come to the house. We’re changing the locks this morning.”
Grant laughed somewhere in the background.
My brother-in-law had the kind of laugh that always sounded like he’d just gotten away with something.
Vanessa lowered her voice.
“We found Dad’s papers. He left the house, his truck, the accounts, everything to me and Grant.”
Then she delivered the line she’d probably rehearsed for years.
“You were specifically excluded.”
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