Let me move.

At twenty-five minutes past one, I called the emergency after-hours line of the bank’s fraud department, and I began the process of flagging and freezing every transaction connected to VLM Lifestyle Holdings and to my mother’s compromised accounts.

At twenty minutes to two, I encrypted the photographs of my mother’s injuries, the financial statements, and the forged transfer authorization, and I transmitted the whole package to a senior elder-abuse investigator I had worked alongside years earlier on a corporate case — a woman who knew at once what she was looking at, and who wrote back within minutes, at two in the morning, a single line: Do not let her leave with anything.

I’m making calls now.

Three professionals, in thirty minutes, in the middle of the night, and none of them raised in my mother’s hearing.

That is what patience buys you.