Part One: The Inheritance
Mission Hills in January looked like a photograph from a magazine about wealth. The kind of magazine that didn’t acknowledge winter as an inconvenience, only as an aesthetic choice. Snow sat on lawns like it had been arranged there. Trees stood bare but dignified against a gray sky. The houses—mansions, really, though the people who lived in them would never use that word—were set back from the road behind walls and hedges and the particular kind of silence that money could buy.
Garrett Milligan parked his Civic on the street. It looked wrong here, like Comic Sans font in a legal document. Or any document, honestly. He sat for a moment with the engine off, watching his breath fog the windshield, remembering the phone call that had brought him here.
Margot’s voice had that clipped efficiency she’d inherited from their mother. No preamble, or “how are you”—they’d long since stopped pretending to care about each other’s lives. “Grandfather passed this morning. The …