“Would you have taken your grandmother’s case?”

I sat there for a long time. Long enough that she got up and made tea.

“I’d have taken the children’s meeting,” I said finally. “Richard and Linda. I’d have given them the hour. And I’d have listened, and about twenty minutes in I’d have heard she won’t give us her passwords and I’d have known what I was dealing with, and I would have declined the case, because she had two evaluations and an affidavit and an attorney and she was plainly competent.

“And then I’d have gone home and I’d have thought about it for a week. Because they weren’t wrong that something was happening. They were wrong about what.”

“That’s the honest answer,” Naomi said. “It’s also not a yes or a no, and the Ozuna family needs one from us by the fourteenth.”

What I recommended, in the end, was a neutral professional fiduciary, a capacity evaluation by someone with no relationship to anyone, and family mediation with a defined bequest to Ms. Bracamontes rather than sixty percent of the estate.