For a moment I simply stared at her, certain I had misheard.

“Are you,” I said slowly, “holding my pain medication hostage?”

I want to stop here, because this is the part that people who have not lived something like it find hardest to believe.

Not the fraud — fraud is common, and comprehensible.

What is hard to believe is the ordinariness of the cruelty.

My mother-in-law stood in a warm, well-decorated house, in her cream sweater and her gold earrings, and calmly informed a woman who had come home from surgery three hours earlier that her prescribed pain relief would be released to her only in exchange for her signature on documents surrendering her estate.