Part 1
“If you receive even a single dollar of my mother’s inheritance, I will ruin your life.” My mother whispered those words in my ear at the law office, squeezing my wrist with a force that contradicted her pristine black dress and the calm smile she offered everyone else.
Her name is Miranda Sterling, and when she makes a threat, it is never on impulse. My name is Jade Sterling, I am twenty-eight years old, and I teach second grade at a public school in Charleston.
To understand what happened in that room, I have to go back six months to the final call I received from my grandmother, Pearl. It was a Tuesday in September and I was at my desk checking spelling notebooks with a cold coffee beside me.
“Jade, listen to me carefully,” my grandmother said in a voice that sounded weak and forced. “Whatever happens, I have already taken care of it, so please promise me you will remember that.”
I promised her, but she changed the subject with that knack of hers that took me from worry to affection in seconds. She asked about my students and whether I was still eating nothing but sweet bread when I was tired.
That was my grandmother Pearl, the woman who picked me up from school when my mother had other commitments. She was the one who taught me to bake without measuring and told me never to let anyone make me feel small.
My mother could never stand that I loved Pearl more than her, and the next morning when I tried to call back, Miranda answered. “My mother is resting and you are not to call again,” she said before hanging up on me.
I called eleven more times that week, but I was met with voicemail or my mother hanging up immediately. On the eighth day, I drove to my grandmother’s house in the old historic district where the porch light was mysteriously off.
I knocked until Travis, my mother’s husband, appeared and blocked the doorway with his arms crossed. “Your mother said she cannot have any visitors right now,” he blurted out.
“She is my grandmother and I just want to see her for five minutes,” I pleaded. “Do not add any more stress to her condition,” he replied before slamming the door in my face.
I stood on the porch listening to the lock click and looked at the yellow lamp in her bedroom window. It was at that moment that I understood my mother was not taking care of Pearl, but was controlling her.
Three months passed and every Sunday I mailed her a card about small things in my life. My mother called me only once during that time to tell me Pearl was changing her estate and that I should focus on my little job.
I tried to find lawyers, but the advance alone cost three months of rent and I had no proof of any wrongdoing. Until one night in November, I received a message from an unknown number saying my grandmother was in palliative care.
I went immediately to the facility in Beaufort, but the receptionist told me I was not on the authorized visitor list. My mother had made a list to decide who could say goodbye to her own mother, and I was intentionally left off.
Two weeks later, Miranda called me at seven in the morning to say Pearl had died and that the funeral was on Thursday. At the service, a nurse from the parking lot approached me and whispered that my grandmother talked about me every day.
