Claire Gallon learned about her future mother-in-law’s strangest weakness completely by accident. One rainy evening, she and Dylan were sitting at the small kitchen table in his rented apartment, surrounded by wedding magazines, ring catalogues, and the warm smell of pepperoni pizza cooling in its cardboard box, when he suddenly shook his head and laughed under his breath. “Mom went to her psychic again,” he said, as if it were the most ordinary complaint in the world.
“Can you believe that? She asked whether today was a favorable day to buy a new purse.”
Claire raised her eyebrows and took a slow bite of pizza. Dylan did not notice the way her attention sharpened.
He leaned back in his chair, rubbing a tired hand over his face after a long day at the office. “She really believes in all that mystical stuff,” he continued. “Cards, runes, predictions, moon signs, whatever else they sell her.
She takes it seriously. Last year she refused to sell her condo because some fortune teller told her the stars weren’t aligned.”
“Your mother?” Claire asked. “Nell Prudam?”
She tried to reconcile that image with the woman she knew: poised, elegant, sharply dressed, business-minded, the kind of woman who could silence a room with one clean glance and negotiate a contract without raising her voice.
“Yeah,” Dylan said. “She’s rational on the outside and superstitious to the core on the inside. Dad used to tease her about it all the time.”
The information lodged in Claire’s mind like a splinter.
She could not explain why at first, only that something in Nell Prudam’s behavior over the previous few weeks had unsettled her. Nell had been asking too many questions about the inheritance Claire had received after her father’s death: the documents, the property status, the bank procedures, whether every form was in order. On the surface, it sounded like concern.
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