So we took a lien on this house to cover her tabs.”

He let that settle, and then he delivered the terms, the same way he must have delivered them a hundred times before to a hundred other desperate people.

“Here is how it works,” he said.

“Either your sister pays me back the two hundred grand by the end of this month, or my firm takes full legal possession of this property.

And then we put your dear old mother in a state asylum, and we do whatever we want with the house.” I looked at my sister, standing there in our mother’s jewelry, and the full, monstrous shape of what they had done finally laid itself bare in front of me.