Second Will

The day of the funeral, Ivy wore white.

Not black, not navy, not the muted gray of someone who understood the assignment. White. A linen dress, flowing, with gold sandals and her hair loose and shining like she'd stepped out of a shampoo commercial. She stood at the graveside like she was expecting a photographer.

Our mother wept into my shoulder. Dad held himself rigid, jaw tight, hands shoved deep in his pockets. The priest said words I couldn't hear over the sound of Ivy's heels clicking against the folding chair as she crossed and uncrossed her legs.

I'd visited Grandpa every Sunday for three years. I knew the way his hand shook when he tried to grip his coffee cup. I knew the smell of his apartment, old books and Bengay and the lemon polish he used on his sideboard. I knew he'd written me letters, long ones, about his childhood in the coal mines, about the woman he loved before Grandma, about the things he regretted.

Ivy knew the Wi-Fi password.

She called me two hours after we lowered him into the ground. I was still in my funeral clothes, sitting on the edge of my bed, staring at a hole in my sock. My feet hurt. My eyes hurt. Everything hurt.

"Grandpa changed the will last month," she said. No preamble. No how are you holding up. "Left everything to me. He said you didn't visit enough."

I didn't say anything. I watched a truck roll past my window, slow, like the driver was lost.

"Ivy," I said finally. "He couldn't even hold a pen last month."

She laughed. It was a clean sound, practiced. "I didn't say he wrote it. I said he changed it."

I should have screamed. I should have driven to her apartment, pounded on her door, made a scene. But I'm not made that way. I'm built for absorbing blows, not throwing them. So I sat there, listened to her explain how she'd brought in a notary, how her boyfriend the paralegal had greased the wheels, how it was all perfectly legal and there was nothing anyone could do.

"Three million," she said. "Can you believe it? Grandpa was sitting on a gold mine."

I believed it. Grandpa had been sitting on a lot of things. A pension he never touched. A life insurance policy he'd taken out in the 70s. A house he'd bought for twelve thousand dollars and refused to sell when it was worth twenty times that. He'd told me once, over canned soup and saltines, that he was saving it for the people who showed up.

I showed up.

She got the money.

My parents tried to fight it. They hired a lawyer, a tired man with coffee stains on his tie, who told them after three weeks that the case was unwinnable. The notary had followed procedure. The video showed Grandpa nodding. It didn't matter that he looked confused, that he kept asking for me, that Ivy had to redirect him seven times.

The law sees what it wants to see.

Ivy bought the condo within a month. Floor-to-ceiling windows, a balcony with a view of the river, a kitchen with marble countertops she photographed from seventeen angles. She posted the pictures with captions like "trusting the process" and "abundance is my birthright."

She hosted sound baths. Crystal healing. A woman came to her apartment twice a week to smudge the corners with sage. Ivy charged people forty dollars to sit on her floor and hum.

I picked up a second job at a diner three miles from my apartment. The coffee was weak, the tips were worse, and my manager kept trying to schedule me for shifts he knew I couldn't work. I did it anyway. Mom's medical bills came every month, thick envelopes with windows that stared at me from the kitchen counter. I paid them in installments. Small bites. Enough to keep the wolves at the door but not enough to ever feel safe.

Dad stopped answering his phone. He'd always been a quiet man, the kind who expressed love through actions, not words. He fixed my car when it broke down. He showed up to every school play. But after Grandpa died, something in him went still. He sat in his recliner, watched the news, and didn't say much.

I understood. There's only so much betrayal a person can absorb before they start to go numb.

Ivy didn't notice. Or if she did, she didn't care. She was too busy manifesting.

Then winter came.

She called me on a Tuesday, late, around eleven at night. I was counting tips at the kitchen table, a pile of crumpled ones and loose change. The radiator hissed. My neighbor's dog barked at nothing.

"I'm being audited," she said.

Her voice was different. Not the smooth, polished tone she used in her videos. This was raw, ragged, like she'd been crying for hours.

"Something's wrong. I need your help."

I set down the quarters. "What kind of help?"

She explained it in pieces, between sobs and pauses. She'd claimed the inheritance without reporting it properly. Her crypto investments had crashed. She'd spent money she didn't have, written off donations she never made, fudged numbers she thought no one would check. The IRS had flagged her account. They wanted $900,000 in back taxes, penalties, legal fees.

Her boyfriend had disappeared. The paralegal. The one who'd helped her steal Grandpa's will. He'd packed a bag and left while she was at a sound bath.

"I just need a loan," she said. "Maybe $100,000. Just to cover the worst of it."

A hundred thousand dollars. Like she was asking for cab fare.

I let her talk. I let her cry. I let her twist the story into something she could live with, where she was the victim and the IRS was some faceless villain stomping on her dreams. She did it so well. She'd always done it well.

When she finished, when the silence stretched long enough that I could hear her breathing, I said, "You told me Grandpa thought I wasn't family anymore. So this wouldn't be my problem, right?"

She went silent.

I hung up.

The next week, I emailed the IRS. I attached screenshots she'd sent me months ago, bragging about her loopholes, her fake receipts, her creative accounting. I included voice memos she'd recorded, her voice bright and sharp, explaining how easy it was to cheat the system if you knew the right people.

I didn't sign my name. I didn't have to.

By spring, her accounts were frozen. The condo was seized. Someone posted a TikTok about her, and then someone else, and then the algorithm did its thing. She trended under #manifestingfraud. Strangers made reaction videos. Her old followers left comments like "karma is real" and "she deserves it."

I didn't watch. I didn't need to.

Last I heard, she was working retail at a strip mall, selling gratitude journals to women who recognized her from her old life. She stood behind a register, scanning barcodes, handing out receipts. No floor-to-ceiling windows. No crystal sound baths.

As for me, I still work two jobs. I still clip coupons. I still count quarters at my kitchen table while the radiator hisses.

But last month, I got a letter. A nurse found it wedged behind Grandpa's bookshelf, between a dog-eared copy of *The Count of Monte Cristo* and a photo album I'd never seen. Handwritten. Dated. Witnessed.

A second will.

This one left everything to me.

The court overturned Ivy's windfall. She owes me restitution. She'll be paying for the rest of her life.

I kept one thing from her condo. A framed quote that once hung above her fireplace, gold letters on white wood. *Abundance flows to those who believe they deserve it.*

I hung it in my kitchen, right next to Grandpa's photo.

He's smiling in that picture. The real smile, the one he saved for Sundays, when I'd bring him soup and we'd watch the game and he'd tell me stories about the old days.

I think he'd like where I put it.