Any decent attorney could make the case that you’re not fit to manage a sum like this. We’d be doing you a favor. There it was. The final card, the one they had been holding in reserve. Not just taking the money, but taking me. My capacity, my voice, my right to make decisions about my own life.
Declare the old woman incompetent. And the problem solves itself. I felt fear, real physical fear, the kind that lives in the chest, because I knew that it was not an empty threat. I knew that people fought and sometimes lost battles like that. I knew that money of this size could purchase legal arguments I could not always predict.
But I had also learned over 74 years that the fear that comes from a direct threat is different from the fear that comes from uncertainty. This fear I could see I could name it. And named things have much less power than unnamed ones. I think you should leave, I said. Derek looked at me for a long moment.