Three days after Charlotte wakes up, Cordelia Sutton hires me.
She rolls her chair up to the front of the Sutton-Marchand townhouse on Saint Charles and hands me a printed agreement.
"Cry for my mother."
I look at her. I look at the headline on the front of the Times-Pic in my hand. Catherine Sutton arraigned. Bail denied. Prosecution preparing additional charges. My mother — my legal mother on paper, anyway — is alive in the parish jail and the parish DA's office is preparing a sealed indictment.
"For the living, ma'am. Surcharge applies."
Cordelia presses a black metal Sutton-Marchand corporate card into my palm.
"Run it."
I open shop the next morning on the sidewalk outside the Sutton compound's Audubon Place gate.
By eleven a.m. there are six news vans on Saint Charles. Two helicopters. The whole local press has been salivating on the Sutton story since the livestream broke. I have on a black dress, the keening sash, the magnolia brooch — the brooch is no longer streaming, it is now a souvenir.
I drop to my knees at the curb.
I open my throat.
"Catherine Sutton — how did you rot your name before the worms could even start!"
The first wail breaks open like a thunderhead. The reporters' microphones swing in.
A Sutton-Marchand security man steps toward me. I round on him.
"Don't lay a hand on me. I am paid by a Sutton daughter. I am here to put the woman's name in the ground while she's still breathing!"
He stops.
I keen Catherine's cold heart. I keen the daughter she treated as a tea service. I keen the daughter she farmed for blood. I keen the husband she may or may not have drowned off Grand Isle. I keen the third daughter she contracted to a midwife twenty-six years ago, then came back for when the supply ran low. I keen for twenty-eight minutes.
Every wail line is paired in real time with a tweet from a verified Sutton-Marchand legal account. Photograph of the apheresis machine. Vendor invoice for in-home blood-product processing. The Grand Cayman IVF clinic billing record. The 1998 ledger page, recovered from the Slidell room linoleum by the parish deputy and reconstructed.
By the time Catherine tries to fake a heart episode for medical bail two days later, I am at the gate of University Medical Center on my knees with my sash on.
"Ma'am, you hang in there now! They haven't even served you the prison cornbread yet!"
Within twelve hours I am a meme. Within forty-eight hours I have one point two million Instagram followers and the @LecroixLament TikTok hits one point eight.
The DMs are unhinged.
Can you keen for an ex.
Can you keen for my boss.
What does the live-subject package cost.
I write one auto-reply.
Living subjects: surcharge. Wicked subjects: double.
Charlotte is slow to recover.
The Sutton-Marchand law firm puts her and Cordelia in a safe house off Audubon Park. The house is a two-story Greek Revival with a side garden and a security gate that does not advertise itself. The sisters share an upstairs room because Cordelia doesn't want to sleep in a separate part of any building.
I bring beignets when I visit.
I am bringing beignets the day I hear them fighting.
The window in the upstairs room is open. Cordelia's voice is the loud one.
"You knew when I was eighteen. You knew when I was twenty. You knew when I went to the ICU after that fall. You let me think I was sick."
Charlotte's voice is a thread. She is coughing between sentences.
"If I'd told you, you'd have run."
"I'd have resisted."
"You'd have died, Cordelia. She'd have stopped pretending. She'd have stopped pretending much earlier."
A long pause.
"I'd have rather died."
"That's why I didn't tell you."
A door bangs upstairs.
I sit down on the bench in the entry hall. Cordelia comes down the stairs about a minute later. Her face is red. She is wiping it with the back of her hand the way you do when you are trying to convince a witness you have not been crying.
She sees me. Her face arranges itself.
"What. You never seen a fight."
I hold up the warm paper bag. The grease has bled through. The sugar is still warm.
"Honey, I've keened sister-on-sister breakdown packages. Y'all are barely middle-tier."
She takes the bag.
"Thanks, Lecroix."
She sits down on the bench next to me. I tear the bag open. The smell of fresh beignet and powdered sugar comes up off the paper.
We eat two each. The third one, neither of us touches.
She wipes powdered sugar off her chin.
"Remy."
"Yeah."
"You hate us?"
I pick the third beignet out of the bag and tear it in half.
"Who specifically."
"The Suttons. Charlotte. Me. Beau."
I think about it.
"There's a line, Cordelia. Y'all are gonna have to take a number."
She laughs. Small. She covers her mouth.
"I don't know how to have a sister."
I press the half-beignet into her palm.
"Funny thing. I don't know how to have one either."
She looks at the sugar on her fingers. Her eyes go wet, and stay wet, and she doesn't wipe them.
There are footsteps in the front hall. Beau Sutton-Marchand has come in from the side yard with a file folder under his arm. He sees us — me, Cordelia, the open beignet bag between us on the bench.
He stops at the end of the corridor.
Cordelia looks up at him. Her voice goes back to its usual edge.
"Mr. Sutton-Marchand. Come to visit your white moonlight?"
Beau doesn't dodge.
"Came to see all three of you."
Cordelia pulls the beignet bag closer to her side.
"Mr. Sutton-Marchand. There's no beignet in this bag with your name on it."
The file folder Beau is carrying is for me.
He sits down across from me at the kitchen table after Cordelia wheels herself back to the upstairs.
He slides it across.
It's a stock transfer agreement. The Sutton-Marchand law firm has been excavating Catherine's frozen estate. Part of what they have pulled out is a trust account my biological mother set up before she died — a small inheritance that was supposed to come to me on my twenty-first birthday and had been swallowed instead into Catherine's holding company.
The figure on the top page is large enough that I read it three times.
I push it back across the table.
"I don't want it."
Beau's brow goes up.
"It's yours."
"If I take it, I'm in. I have lawyers, I have a will, I have meetings with people whose names I don't want to know."
"Miss Lecroix. You're already a Sutton."
I look at him. I keep my face flat.
"Mr. Sutton-Marchand. After everything we have done together in three weeks, you still haven't understood. I am not a Sutton. I am the woman my grandma raised. Whatever they put on a piece of paper in 1998, my grandma named me back."
He sits with that.
I stand up.
"Miss Lecroix."
I turn at the door.
He slides a small white envelope across the table.
"That's a personal apology. From me. For the threat to Mrs. Lecroix."
I open it. There's a cashier's check inside, made out to me personally, drawn from a personal account, not a Sutton-Marchand account. The number is significant. Significant in the way a man who is paying a personal apology with money he is genuinely going to feel writing is significant.
I fold the check into my keening sash.
"I accept the apology. Forgiveness is priced separately, Mr. Sutton-Marchand. It won't come this cheap."
He nods, once.
"I know."
I thought that was where the story ended, in the doorway of a safe house with sugar still on my fingers.
The next night, Grandma Mae told me, from her wicker rocker by the window, that she wanted to meet them.
The day of the meeting she put on the lavender Sunday dress and the small pearls I had given her for her seventieth.
Cordelia rolls in. Charlotte rolls behind in her own borrowed chair, oxygen tubes tucked behind her ears.
The two Sutton girls bow their heads in front of an old woman in a parish-Medicaid room and don't say anything for a long time.
Grandma Mae reaches out, slow, and lays her fingers on Cordelia's wrist where the port scar is.
She cries without making a sound.
"I'm sorry. Mon p'tit pain — " her free hand finds my hand. "I'm sorry. I only had the one to spare."
Cordelia goes down on her knees against the side of the wheelchair. She buries her face against Grandma Mae's lap.
"Not your fault. Mrs. Lecroix. None of this is your fault."
Charlotte cries silently from her chair.
I stand by the door.
The stone that has been on my chest since the morning we came out of the Audubon Place gate slips down out of my chest and lands on the floor. I can hear the absence of it.
Not because Catherine Sutton is in jail.
Because my grandma is finally not afraid.