Free Angel Condemned by Mary Stanton

person. We’ll call a family meeting. With all of us sitting there, Cissy’s got to see reason.”
    “You ever known Mamma to interfere? She’s always let us make our own mistakes. Did they cut you off when you dropped out of school to chase after going on the stage? All they did was point out how much better off you’d be with a college education.”
    “I’m perfectly able to make decisions about my own life,” Antonia said crossly.
    “Exactly.”
    “Oh, never mind .” Antonia scowled and bit at her thumbnail. “What a mess. That Chambers character’s trying to extort fifty thousand dollars from her. I suppose you think we should all sit by for that?”
    “It’s not extortion,” Bree said. She felt her confusion ebb as she concentrated on the legalities of Cissy’s position. It helped to focus on the task at hand. She’d have to remember that. “He made a legitimate offer to drop the suit.”
    “Is she going to pay up?” Antonia swung her feet to the floor and sat up. “You’d best tell Mamma if she is. I mean, honestly. Fifty thousand dollars. That’s a pile of money. If anyone can talk some sense into her, it’s Mamma.”
    Bree thought about the woman she called mother. Of all the unsettling events that had occurred since she’d taken on Great-Uncle Franklin’s celestial appeals practice, the most unnerving had been the discovery that she wasn’t the child of Royal and Francesca Winston-Beaufort, but their niece. Franklin had been her father. And her own birth mother, a woman named Leah, had died as Bree was being born. She knew nothing at all about Leah, except for the talisman she had left her. A tiny gold replica of the scales of justice, enfolded by a pair of angel wings. Francesca had given her the talisman four months ago, when Bree reopened Franklin’s cases. It was on a chain around her neck. She never took it off.
    She got up and walked up and down the small living room. Something was wrong. Off. She felt it like a pressure at the base of her skull. She stopped at the French doors leading to their little concrete patio and looked out. The lights across the river were dim and insubstantial. She turned and stood in front of the fireplace. The antique mirror that hung over the white-painted mantel was clear at the moment, reflecting Bree herself, and behind her, Antonia.
    That wasn’t always the case. Nobody in the family seemed to know just how old the mirror was; Francesca seemed to think Franklin had found it at an auction somewhere. Just lately, Bree found that if she stared into the mottled depths, she could see the shadowy outline of a pale-faced, dark-haired woman looking back at her. Leah. It had to be Leah. The slender, waif-like creature who had married Franklin when he was fifty-five and she no more than the age Bree was now.
    “I said, hey!” Antonia tossed a cushion at her. “You okay? You planning on sitting down and staying awhile? You haven’t even taken your coat off.”
    “I’m fine. A little tired, that’s all.”
    “Is your leg bothering you?”
    Bree tossed her coat onto the couch and flexed her right leg absently. It was an unintended consequence of one of her most dismaying appeals cases. “Nope. It’s fine.”
    “Are you upset by what Cissy said about you in the restaurant? Don’t pay her any mind. All that stuff she said about you living like a nun? Well, you are, but so what? That’s your choice, right? And she’s like, thirty years older than we are, and she’s got to be feeling that time is running out for her.”
    “At fifty-nine?” Bree said. “I don’t think so.”
    “That generation gets all squirrelly about guys and hooking up, anyway,” Antonia said. “So don’t go all moody on me, okay? Time’s not running out for either one of us. Honest to God, Bree, you’re walking around with a cloud over your head and depressing the heck out of me. Cut it out.”
    Bree looked down at Sasha. He met the look with a sort of mournful reassurance