She opened her laptop. “Before anybody goes anywhere, I need every detail you can give me. Full names. Old address. Ryan’s full name. Anything.”
James frowned. “Why?”
“Because I used to work fraud detection at the bank for six years. And what he did to you has a name. Several, actually. And I’m not letting him get away with it.”
Grace started crying again, but this time she reached across the table and squeezed Sophia’s hand like it was the only solid thing left in the world.
The next weeks were a blur of police reports, frozen bank accounts, and a lawyer named David who kept saying, “This is the cleanest elder-exploitation case I’ve ever seen.”
Ryan had done it before—three other couples in Virginia and North Carolina. Same script. Gain trust, convince them to sell, forge documents, vanish.
He was arrested in Maryland running the same con on a widow in Annapolis.
Sophia became James and Grace’s legal guardian so the state couldn’t shove them into a home. She fought Patricia—James and Grace’s daughter from New York—who swooped in with lawyers and accusations and guilt thick enough to choke on.