I’m Mila, twenty-nine years old, and for eighteen months my mother dragged me through court, trying to prove my grandmother was senile when she wrote her will. Eighteen months of calling me a gold digger, a snake, an ungrateful grandchild who had manipulated a helpless old woman.
What my mother did not know was that Grandma had been preparing for this day for a very, very long time.
And when we found the hidden room inside the mansion, a room that had been sealed for forty years, everything changed.
The call came at 6:47 a.m. on a Tuesday.
“Miss Marshall, this is Hartford General. Your grandmother, Margaret Marshall, has been admitted. Congestive heart failure.”
I was on a plane from Portland within three hours. The whole flight, my hands would not stop shaking. Grandma Margaret was eighty-four, but she had always seemed invincible to me. She was the woman who taught me to plant roses, who held me while I cried myself to sleep at seven years old, the night my mother walked out.
When I arrived at the hospital, my mother was already there.
Karen Marshall, fifty-four, blonde highlights, Hermes scarf draped just so, stood in the hallway talking to a doctor. She did not acknowledge me. Not a glance. Not a nod.
I approached slowly. “Mom, how is she?”
