Brandon looked down at the desk blotter.

“That was a corporate adjustment.”

“It was greed, plain and simple,” I said.

Melissa gripped the edge of the table and leaned across toward me.

“How can you be this cruel to your own family?”

I reached into my breast pocket and took out Evelyn’s reading glasses.

I set them down softly beside Margaret’s legal pad.

“Cruel was telling a grieving seventy-one-year-old husband he had to become financially independent less than an hour after he buried his wife,” I said.