“Don’t come to regret this, Hannah.”

And that was the last conversation I ever had with my mother-in-law.

Not a fight.

Not a scene.

A woman of seventy on a doorstep in Chula Vista, telling me to consider what I was capable of offering.

I saw a family attorney on Wednesday — a woman named Deborah Nakashima with an office above a bank in Hillcrest — and brought her the deed, the mortgage statements, twelve months of the joint account, and my own separate records going back to 2016, because I am who I am.

She looked at it for six minutes and then said the sentence that people in that profession must say a hundred times a year and which I had never heard applied to me.