And she had been married to Richard, a notoriously wealthy, older real estate developer with a bad heart, for twenty years.

Suddenly, nineteen years of bizarre memories clicked into place with horrifying clarity. The way David and Margaret always ended up in the kitchen together at family gatherings, talking in hushed tones.

The lavish vacations Richard and Margaret took us on, paying for everything under the guise of “treating family,” which always resulted in David and Margaret taking long walks on the beach while Richard rested and I watched the kids. The way David was never quite present in our marriage, always distracted, always waiting for something else.

He was waiting for Richard to die.

Margaret had orchestrated the entire thing. She wanted Richard’s massive fortune, but she didn’t want to give up David, her young, handsome lover. But a mistress is messy. A mistress causes scandals. So, what did my brilliant, sociopathic sister do? She convinced David to date her boring, dependable, naive younger sister. She kept him entirely in her orbit. She effectively used me as a free babysitter for her boyfriend for nearly two decades.

I gripped the edge of Stacy’s desk to keep my legs from collapsing under me. I thanked her, turned around, and walked back to the elevator.

I drove straight to Margaret’s sprawling estate. The massive iron gates were closed, but I knew the code. I had watered her plants a hundred times while she and Richard were in Europe. I unlocked the front door with my spare key and stepped into the deafening silence of the massive house.

They weren’t there, of course. They were on their way to the coast to celebrate their morbid victory.

But I walked into Margaret’s pristine home office. I started opening drawers. I wasn’t the naive little sister anymore; I was a woman who had just had her entire reality shattered, and I was looking for the pieces. It didn’t take long to find them.

In the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet, locked but easily popped open with a letter opener, I found a thick manila folder. Inside were real estate listings for a massive compound in Aspen, printed just three days after Richard’s funeral. There were brochures for private schools in Colorado for my children. And at the bottom of the pile, a printed email from David to Margaret, dated two weeks ago, when Richard first went into hospice.