Chapter 3 - The Switzerland Tea
The tea canister was still in my kitchen cabinet.
It was a beautiful, brushed-steel tin with a silver label printed in German. My mother had given it to me on a Tuesday afternoon in early March, her face bright with that rare, artificial warmth she reserved for when she was about to ask for a favor or deliver a strike.
"It’s wild mountain thyme, Emily," she had said, her fingers stroking my hair with a motherly gentleness that had made me want to cry with gratitude. "It’s what the Swiss women drink to strengthen the baby’s heart. Drink a cup every night before bed."
I had trusted her. Because despite thirty years of coldness, despite her disapproval of Daniel, she was still my mother. And when you are carrying your first child, you want your mother to be right. You want her to be safe.
Daniel sat at our kitchen table, a pair of blue latex gloves on his hands, using a small plastic spoon to transfer a sample of the dried grey-green leaves into a sterile specimen cup.
"I’m taking this to the university lab tomorrow morning," he said. "I have a colleague in the toxicology department. He can run a high-resolution screen for synthetic alkaloids."
"Do you think she knew?" I asked. I was sitting on the floor, my knees pulled to my chest, my eyes fixed on the silver tin. "Do you think my sister knew what was in there?"
"Vanessa was the one who bought the tin, Emily," Daniel said, not looking at me. His focus was entirely on the leaves. "I checked the visa statements from your father’s old business account last week. There was a transaction for three hundred dollars at a specialty botanist shop in Vancouver two days before your mother came over. The shop specializes in organic abortifacients."
The word hung in the kitchen like a heavy frost. Abortifacients.
"They killed my baby," I whispered. It wasn't a question. It was a fact that settled into my bones, cold and heavy as lead. "For two million dollars."
"We don't have proof yet," Daniel said, standing up and sealing the cup. "But we will. And when we do, they aren't just going to lose the money, Emily. They're going to lose their lives."
The phone on the counter began to ring.
It was my father's old estate lawyer, Arthur Pendelton. He was seventy-five, a man who had survived three strokes and forty years of my mother's screaming phone calls with his dignity intact.
"Emily?" Arthur’s voice was dry, paper-thin, and urgent. "Are you home?"
"Yes, Arthur. I’m here."
"Your mother has just filed an emergency petition with the probate court," he said. "She’s claiming that your father’s private trust was executed under 'undue influence' from you and Daniel. She’s presenting a copy of a will from 2018 that names Vanessa as the sole executor of the Cascade land."
"That will was revoked, Arthur," I said, my voice hardening. "Dad signed the new one in your office two weeks before he died."
"I know that, Emily," Arthur sighed. "But the original copy of the new will—the one with his physical signature—was kept in his private safe at the Sammamish cabin. The digital copy in my system is legally valid, but if she can prove the physical original has been 'destroyed' or is missing, she can delay the probate for years. By the time the court rules, the trust will have dissolved. The money will be gone."
I looked at the wall safe in my memory. The crowbar on the floor.
Vanessa hadn't been trying to open the safe to find the trust. She had been trying to find the physical will.
And she had failed.
"Arthur," I said. "Where is the physical copy of the 2018 will? The one she’s using?"
"She has it in her possession, Emily," Arthur said. "She’s bringing it to the probate office tomorrow morning at nine. If you don't have the original signed will from the cabin by then, the judge is going to grant her temporary administration of the estate."
"I’ll find it," I said.
I hung up the phone. I didn't look at Daniel. I stood up, walked to my father’s old leather work bag sitting in the hallway closet, and pulled out the small, silver key he had given me the day before his heart failed.
He had told me it was a key to his "heart."
I had thought he was being sentimental. I had thought he was talking about the cabin.
May you like
But as I held the metal key in the kitchen light, I realized the bow of the key wasn't shaped like a heart.
It was shaped like a lily.
