“It was,” I said, resting my hand on my belly. “But not anymore.”

The next morning, my attorney filed for an emergency protective order. We secured immediate, exclusive possession of the trust-owned house, and filed a motion demanding the preservation of all of Grant’s financial records.

My mother’s estate attorney froze Grant’s access to a joint operational account we discovered he’d been draining for months.

When the financial investigators dug into the routing numbers, they found massive unauthorized transfers being funneled into a private offshore account that Evelyn exclusively controlled.

Nearly eighty thousand dollars had vanished in ninety days.

That discovery changed the entire trajectory of the investigation.