The first thing Mira noticed when she stepped into St.
Michael’s Chapel was the smell of lilies.
They were arranged in white waves over her father’s coffin, too beautiful and too sweet, the kind of flowers people choose when they want death to look clean.
Rain slid from the hem of her black coat and tapped softly onto the marble floor.
Every drop sounded louder than it should have.
She had not been inside that chapel in ten years.
The last time she had stood beneath its high wooden rafters, she had still believed there was a chance her father might change his mind about her.
She had been nineteen then, standing on the front steps with one suitcase, a bus ticket, and a sentence burned into her bones.
“You are no daughter of mine.”
He had said it in the driveway, not quietly, not privately, not with any shame.
Vanessa had stood behind him that day, crying into a tissue with perfect timing.
Mira remembered the tissue more than the tears.
It had been folded neatly in Vanessa’s hand, like a prop she had chosen before the scene began.
Before that, Mira and Vanessa had been sisters in the way children are told they are sisters.
They had shared a bedroom until Mira was twelve.
They had worn matching Easter dresses once, back when their mother was still alive and their father still knew how to laugh without looking around to see who admired him for it.
Mira had helped Vanessa study for algebra, covered for her when she missed curfew, and once sold a bracelet from their mother’s jewelry box to pay off a debt Vanessa swore she would repay.
That was the first trust signal Mira ever gave her sister.
A secret.
Vanessa learned early that Mira could be made responsible for things Vanessa did.
By the time the checks appeared, Mira should have known better.
They were drawn from a First Montana Bank business account tied to their father’s company.
Three checks.
All with Mira’s name forged across the bottom.