Chapter 18 · Five Grand by Morning

The lawyer hits the door again.

Above my head, the timber beam spits a puff of dry rot.

"Mrs. Voss. I know you're up there. Your sister sends her love."

Garrett doesn't move.

He's flat on his back across the iron bed frame, boots crossed at the ankles, one arm tucked behind his head. Like the man banging on our stairs is just rain on a tin roof, not a Shore family attorney screaming my name through four inches of pine and thirty years of peeling latex.

"Garrett."

"I hear him."

"Get up."

"No."

Two more heavy slams. Then the tone shifts—that calm, practiced lawyer voice that means they own the clock and you're just leasing the minutes back.

"Six a.m., the hospice cuts the generator, Vivian. June signed the transfer this afternoon. There's a county bed waiting in New Bedford. You did clinicals in one of those wards. You know what happens to the vents when the storm knocks out the local grid."

My fingers slide right off the iron rail.

I drop onto the top step hard enough to rattle my back teeth.

Garrett is off the mattress before I can draw another breath. He doesn't rush.