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counting. Anyway”—she gestured for Aurora to sit on the yellow plaid couch—“you’re not here to listen to an old lady’s stories. Again, I was so very, very sorry to hear about your grandfather’s passing. Hunter Broussard was one of the kindest, smartest men I’ve ever known.”
    “Thank you,” Aurora said, a catch in her voice. “He was a wonderful man. More like a father to me.” The only father she’d ever known. “You said you were longtime friends?”
    “Oh, yes.” Luna smiled. “You wouldn’t know it now, but I’m a bayou girl, born and raised in Hambone, just north of where your folks are from. I used to wait tables at one of the fried fish joints on the causeway, and your granddaddy was a regular customer. Always respectful, always left a big tip. He teased me that I’d forget about all the bayou folks back home once I became a lawyer in the big city.” She held up a charm that dangled at the end of a gold chain wrapped around her desk lamp, and in the light, Aurora saw an image of an outstretched palm with stars protruding from the fingertips. “I never forgot where I came from. Still got my voodoo charms.”
    “So you knew my family, then?” Aurora searched Luna’s face.
    Luna nodded. “Oh, yes,” she said.
    Of course she did.
    Luna leaned towards Aurora. “I’ve seen a lot, Aurora. I know that what your daddy did casts a long shadow.”
    “Yes.”
    Wade Atchison, her father, had murdered her mother in cold blood when Aurora was a toddler. When Aurora was growing up with her grandparents, she had looked for him in the dark corners of her room, under the bed, in the back of the closet. Wade’s dead in a ditch somewhere, by the grace of God , she’d heard her grandmother say one morning when she was supposed to be out of earshot.
    But there was always the possibility that he wasn’t.
    “Your grandfather, he loved you so much,” Luna said. “And he was so proud of you. ‘My granddaughter,’ he used to tell me, ‘she saves lives every single day.’”
    Aurora managed a smile, but the pinprick sensation was beginning behind her eyes, the swell of grief rising in her chest. Luna slid a velvet-covered tissue box in her direction, and Aurora plucked a tissue free.
    “I understand he was ill for quite some time,” Luna continued, hoisting an accordion file in front of her. “Had he spoken to you at all—about the estate?”
    “The estate? You mean the house?” Estate seemed like a fancy word for the tiny two-bedroom in Connecticut where Aurora had grown up.
    “No, the estate refers to all of his property—assets, real property, all of that.” She began pulling papers from the file, her voice shifting into a businesslike tone. Luna dealt with death every day, just like her. It was in every file that cluttered her desk. Did she see it as a series of calculations, an ordered list of possessions?
    “We really didn’t talk about that.”
    “That’s okay! That’s fine.” Luna beamed at her. “It’s my job to deal with these things, and I can answer any questions you might have. But I have to let you know, there are some things here that I’m not licensed to handle, with regards to the real property, the house. I do have some great contacts down there, though, and—”
    “Down where?”
    “In Florida. Cooper’s Bayou.”
    Aurora’s breath caught in her throat. Papa had left Cooper’s Bayou behind after her mother’s death. It was another world, a place where terrible things had happened that were never discussed, all vestiges of that prior life scrubbed free from their lives in Connecticut. In her face, Aurora saw that Luna Riley knew the whole sad story, and that there was much, much more than Aurora had imagined.
    “There’s a house in Cooper’s Bayou?”
    Luna swiveled a color printout to face her. The house was a plantation in miniature, blue with delicate white trim the color of birthday cake icing. Beveled glass doors opened onto a patio half obscured by