The next morning, Greg sat across from me at the kitchen table.
Dana was nearby.
Greg pushed a transfer paper toward me and placed a pen beside it.
“Sign this house over and leave by Friday.”
I looked at the paper.
Then I looked at my son.
For six months, I had been waiting for the moment when he would stop pretending this was about helping me.
Now the pretense was gone.
I lifted my tea and took a sip.
“First ask the man who owns this house,” I said.
Greg laughed.
He told me the only man who had ever owned the house had been buried two years earlier.
He meant Walter.
Dana slammed her cup down hard enough to splash coffee across the table.
“Walter is dead, you crazy old woman. Keep talking like that and we’ll tell a judge you’re confused. Confused old women get locked rooms, not sewing rooms.”
There it was.
Not concern.
Not worry about my memory.
A threat.
Greg leaned toward me.
“Friday, Mom. The realtor comes at ten. The van comes at noon. Sign before then, and this stays friendly.”
I looked at the transfer paper again.
They believed they had arranged every detail.
The realtor.
The van.
The nursing home bed.
The signature they expected me to provide.
They had built their plan around one assumption: that the elderly woman sleeping on a folding bed in the sewing room had done nothing while they took over her life.
I did not argue with them.
I did not tell them they were wrong.
I simply waited for Friday.
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