“That helps you.”
“How does that help me legally?”
“It doesn’t directly.”
“That’s Sandra’s job.”
“But it helps you know that when he comes back, and he will come back, you don’t have to figure out what you’re looking at anymore.”
“You already know.”
She finished the last ledger entry.
Closed the book.
Capped her pen.
“Fourteen months,” she said.
“I told myself so many things for fourteen months.”
“What kind of things?”
“That it wasn’t that bad.”
“That family was complicated.”
“That he was just stressed or worried.”
She shook her head.
“That the alternative, doing anything about it, was too complicated.”
“Too embarrassing.”
“That I had partly brought it on myself by signing those things.”
She looked at her hands.
“That nobody would believe me.”
Jack was quiet.
“Some of that might still be true.”
She looked at him.
“Parts of the process are going to be complicated.”
“Some people are not going to believe you right away.”
He paused.
“But the part about being alone in it?”
“That part isn’t true anymore.”
“So you can stop telling yourself that one.”
She looked at him for a moment.
“You’re surprisingly good at this.”
“At what?”
“Saying the right thing.”
He looked almost uncomfortable.
“I’ve had a lot of situations where the wrong thing had consequences.”
She almost smiled.
“That’s one way to learn.”
She gathered her things.
For the first time, he walked her to her car.
Not because she needed someone to.
She had always walked herself.
But because sometimes accepting something was its own kind of statement.
She drove home.
Ryan wasn’t there.
She cooked dinner.
She sat at Gerald’s table.
And she thought about the word consequences.
The next Tuesday, Sandra called again.
“I’ve reviewed what you sent me.”
“And I want to tell you something clearly because I think you need to hear it from someone who has seen a lot of these cases.”
A pause.
“What happened to you was not ambiguous.”
“The sequence.”
“The timing.”
“The documentation.”
“This is a textbook undue influence case with financial exploitation layered on top.”
Evelyn sat very still.
“I also want to tell you that it’s going to require some things from you.”
“We need to file for a formal review of the asset transfers.”
“That means Ryan will be notified.”
“That means he will respond.”
“And his response will probably be to move quickly on several fronts.”
“What fronts?”
“He may attempt to have you declared incompetent.”
The words landed heavily.
“He would try to have me declared incompetent.”
“Not a question.”
Just a sentence.
“He would try,” Sandra said.