The Visit

Priscilla found Connie's address the way she found everything: by making one phone call and being unpleasant until someone gave her what she wanted.

The apartment was small, two rooms over a laundromat, decorated with framed photographs of the Voss children as babies — photographs, Connie realized too late as she opened the door, that made this look exactly as strange as Priscilla wanted it to look.

"You kept pictures of us," Priscilla said, stepping in without being asked. "That's sweet. That's almost sweet enough to be evidence."

"Priscilla—"

"Mrs. Domingo. Or should I say, Ms. Domingo, sole heir." She turned slowly, taking in the worn sofa, the single space heater, the modesty of a life that did not look like it belonged to a woman about to inherit eleven million dollars. "You know what's funny? You don't even look happy."

"I didn't ask for this."

"Then give it back." Priscilla set a folder on the small kitchen table — an agreement, already drawn up, a settlement figure typed at the bottom generous enough to buy the apartment building outright. "Sign this. Walk away with more money than you've made in your whole life working for us, and nobody has to say ugly things about you in a courtroom."

Connie didn't touch the folder. "Your father wanted me to have it."

"My father was eighty-four years old and dying and you were alone with him every single day. Do you understand how that looks?"

"I understand exactly how it looks," Connie said quietly. "I've understood how it looks for thirty years."

Something flickered across Priscilla's face — not doubt, not yet, but the first hairline crack of it. She picked the folder back up.

"Fine. We'll do it the hard way." At the door she paused, hand on the frame, and looked back with an expression Connie couldn't quite read — anger, yes, but something underneath it too, older and more frightened. "You have no idea what you're protecting by staying quiet about whatever this really is. No idea what it would do to this family if certain things came out."

She was gone before Connie could ask what she meant.