I called Linda Martinez the next morning at nine o’clock sharp.
Linda is fifty-four. A small, dark-haired attorney with a voice like cool water. Her office is on the second floor above a flower shop on Camelback Road. You walk up a narrow staircase, and the whole way up, it smells like roses and eucalyptus.
She handled Walt’s estate, back when Danny was fifteen. She handled my mother’s, too, eight years ago.
In all that time, I have never once seen Linda Martinez hurry.
“Margaret,” she said on the phone. “How are you?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Can I come see you?”
“Today at two.”
I carried the purple folder to her office in a canvas tote bag from the library. Along with my legal pad. And Walt’s calculator.
She listened to me for forty minutes without saying a single word.
I told her everything. The HOUSE account. The hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars. The closing. The produce aisle. The text.
“Sarah’s dad says he’d rather you didn’t come.”
When I finally finished, she took off her reading glasses and set them down on the desk.
“Margaret,” she said. “May I say something? And I’d like you to hear all of it. Not just the first part.”
“Please.”
“Being treated badly by your family does not give you a legal right to take back a gift,” she said. “If you gave them that house, and it closes in their names, it’s theirs. A court is not going to undo it because of one hurtful text message. No matter how hurtful.”
“I understand.”
“And Arizona has no law that lets you cancel a completed gift just because the relationship has gone sour.”
My shoulders sank. I looked down at my hands in my lap.
“But,” Linda said.
She put her glasses back on. She turned a page in the purple folder.
“That isn’t where you are.”
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