I simply could not bear, until the very end, to read them about my own son.

I moved into a smaller house twelve miles away, one floor, large bright windows, a garden I could manage myself, and then I did the thing Michael would never have predicted.

I went back to work, three days a week, and opened a small consulting practice devoted entirely to fraudulent guardianships and the financial exploitation of the elderly.

My first client was seventy-eight years old, and her niece had convinced the rest of the family that she was confused, and ninety thousand dollars had vanished from her accounts in eight months.

She sat across my desk and apologized, and it was the apologizing that undid me, because I had heard it before, in my own heart, in the weeks after I first understood what Michael was doing.