“He wasn’t really a hospice patient, was he?”
Daniel looked pained.
“The c/@/ncer was real.”
“But our meeting wasn’t.”
“No.”
“How did he arrange it?”
“He donated anonymously to the hospice program. Then he requested you as his volunteer.”
Everything I had believed about our friendship shifted.
Yet the kindness had been real. I could not doubt that. Carl had laughed when I cheated badly at Scrabble. He remembered how I took my tea. He apologized whenever he became too tired to finish a conversation.
He had manipulated our meeting.
But he had also loved me.
“Why wait until he was d/y/i/ng?” I asked.
“Because Lenora had begun buying the land around your apartment,” Daniel said. “She knew who you were.”
A chill moved through me.
“What did she want?”
“The same thing she has wanted for thirty-one years. The Bennett inheritance.”
Daniel reached into the chest and removed a leather folder.
