“The aide.

A nice woman.

But your wife told her, right in front of me, that I was aggressive, and difficult, and not to believe anything I said because my mind was going.” She swallowed.

“And then the woman stopped coming.”

So that was the shape of it.

Wendy had hired an aide — with my mother’s stolen money — and then, the moment there was a witness in the house, had poisoned the witness against my mother in advance, exactly the way she had tried to poison me, laying the groundwork so that anything my mother ever said would be dismissed as the ravings of a difficult, declining old woman.