The Power and the Glory

Chapter 1

The beige walls pressed at her from every angle, and Irene barely kept herself from screaming.

"Miss Santos, are you all right? You seem to have gone quite pale all of a sudden." The lawyer's mild voice snapped her back to reality, and she forced herself to take a deep breath and reorient herself. The tedium and frustration bubbled and simmered within her for a long moment before eventually receding enough to leave her functional, if not precisely all right.

"Sorry. Yeah, I'm fine. There's just a lot to take in, and I don't—I'm not used to things being so crazy. Please, continue."

Sharp gray eyes peered at her through thick glasses, scanning her in moments and penetrating the transparent lie with discomforting ease. Irene could practically see the wheels turning in the other woman's head: Is she stable? Will I have to get a psychologist on the line to have a word with her? It was painfully obvious that the lawyer was unused to dealing with minors; everything from her too-neat desk and too-stiff blouse to the halting, inane introductions and pleasantries they had exchanged not five minutes ago. Together with the utter blandness of the office decor they grated against her senses like fine-grained sandpaper— a ceaseless irritant that never entered the realm of pain until everything was left raw and aching for days afterwards.

It wasn't her fault, not really. Banality was hardly an enormous fault. But in the awful, empty aftermath of a death, it seemed an affront to common decency that everyone in the world could just...carry on, leaving the fallen behind without so much as a stumble. Particularly when she found her own steps fettered into a halting crawl.

Beyond that, when there was nothing to hold her attention, she found herself thinking. And thoughts nowadays could only lead to further cracks in her entirely precarious focus and veneer of control.

The fluorescent lights overhead flickered, and the lawyer blinked, having evidently reached a conclusion. "Very well. As I was saying, your mother had no will to dictate the recipient of her estate; however, this shouldn't pose a problem as you are her only known descendant and therefore her legal heir. After the necessary paperwork is completed, you'll be given access to her savings account information, and by law the property in your apartment which was once hers is now yours. I can't be sure without seeing the numbers, but I suspect what remains in her account will be enough to pay off whatever debts she had before her death. Can you think of any organization in particular who might have an outstanding loan?"

Joining the army's engineer corps had taken the brunt of her mother's college debts, but there were still some remnants to pay off even after nearly two decades. Raising a daughter alone on an acceptable yet unimpressive salary had slowly been whittling away at it, and by now there was only a small amount left. Irene shook her head in a silent negative. The lawyer (how could she keep forgetting her name? It was like her eyes skimmed over the brass plaque on the woman's desk, letting the information slide away from her consciousness like the mundane details of the rest of the office) made a note on a sheet in front of her.

"That's good news, then. The manner of your mother's death also prevented a sizable chunk of funerary expenses from being necessary, and I know from experience it's very easy for that sort of thing to get out of hand and end up bankrupting families going through a loss. In a way, things have worked out in a fortunate manner for you."

She was beginning to suspect that the lawyer was operating under a rather unusual definition of the word 'fortunate.'

"I'm afraid there's going to be some bad news as well, or at least inconvenient news. Your mother was an only child, and we have no records of your father's identity. Are you in contact with anyone related to your grandparents?"