“And I am standing in front of the land-records desk looking at a forged quitclaim deed with my signature on it.”

Arthur’s breath hitched, audibly, over the speaker.

“You have one hour to meet us at my house,” Grandma commanded.

“If you aren’t there, the next call my grandson makes will be to the State Prosecutor’s elder-fraud division.” And she reached over and hung up the phone herself, with a firm press of her thumb, and handed it back to me.

I looked at my grandmother — eighty-one years old, in a church coat, having been abandoned in a lobby that same morning, now standing at a courthouse counter having just issued a one-hour ultimatum to her own son with the composure of a prosecutor — and I felt something I had not expected to feel in the middle of all that grief, which was awe.