She apologized for getting old, as though age were a moral failing she had committed against her family.

She apologized for trusting her own relatives, as though the fault for a betrayal lies with the person trusting rather than the person betraying.

She apologized for not noticing sooner, as though a loving aunt were supposed to spend her days auditing the people she loved for signs of predation.

It is the cruelest secondary wound of elder exploitation, this shame, the way it convinces its victims that they are somehow to blame for having been preyed upon, that their trust was a stupidity rather than a virtue.

I reached across the desk and took her hand and told her to stop apologizing, and then I said, “Now show me the statements.” Six months later, we had recovered most of her money.