I had trained a forensic investigator who dropped everything to help me.

I had the money to hire a neurologist and the presence of mind to seek one out.

I had a husband who, even dying, had the foresight and the legal sophistication to build a trap of his own.

Take away any one of those, and the morning goes differently.

And I could not stop thinking, sitting in that courtroom having won, about all the people who have none of those advantages, the ordinary elderly widow with no forensic training and no investigator on speed dial and no wealthy prescient husband, who is confronted by exactly the same scheme and simply loses, quietly, her competence stripped away by a court that believed the confident child over the frightened parent.

I won.