“Not stupid.”
Jack stayed quiet.
“I knew something felt wrong.”
“I just…”
She stopped.
“I was in a place where I needed to believe in something.”
“And he was what was in front of me.”
“So I believed.”
Jack listened.
“That’s going to work against me,” she said.
“Any attorney is going to say I made the decisions voluntarily.”
“He’s going to say I wasn’t coerced.”
“He’s going to say I understood what I was signing.”
“Sandra will tell you about undue influence,” Jack said.
She looked up.
“You know about that.”
“I looked it up.”
“Last week.”
She blinked.
She wasn’t sure why this surprised her.
But it did.
This man who ran a motorcycle chapter.
This man who carried himself like someone who navigated most of his life by instinct and force of will.
Had sat down somewhere in the last week.
And looked up elder financial abuse law.
Because of her.
“Undue influence doesn’t require a signature at gunpoint,” Jack said.
“It requires a power imbalance.”
“Isolation.”
“Dependency.”
“Someone whose decision-making capacity was compromised.”
“Not permanently.”
“But at the specific time the decisions were made.”
He looked at her.
“You were in the months after your husband died.”
“He started asking within six months.”
Sandra said the same thing.
Evelyn said quietly.
“Because it’s true.”
She turned back to her desk.
She pulled out her legal pad.
She began writing down dates.
Every date she could remember.
Every transaction.
Every conversation.
Every document.
Every moment she had said something.
And Ryan had overridden it.
Every moment she had felt the fence close in a little tighter.
She wrote in her small, precise handwriting.
Filling the pages quickly.
And without pausing.
Because it was all there.
Every bit of it.
Stored in the filing system of her mind.
The one that had never once failed her in 76 years.
Tommy appeared in the doorway around midmorning.
He stood there for a moment watching her.
“Right.”
She didn’t look up.
“You want coffee?”
“Please.”
He came back with the coffee.
And stood there a moment longer.
She could tell he wanted to say something.
She kept writing.
And waited.
“Is everything okay?”
He asked finally.
“I mean with the thing with…”