Then I set a small folded slip of paper on the table in front of her — the original receipt from the wig shop that had bought my wife’s hair for a hundred and fifty dollars.

“While you hid more than seventy thousand dollars in private investment accounts,” I said, “Della sold her own hair to afford a cancer biopsy. Are you going to tell me her hair was a gift to you too?”

My mother looked at the floor for one moment. Then her face hardened again. “She was always fragile. And you’re my son. Your mother should come first.”

“Being my mother never gave you the right — moral or legal — to watch my wife die,” I answered.

Tara let out a shaky laugh. “You don’t even know she’s really sick! She probably made it all up to take everything for herself.”

My attorney opened the medical file: diagnostic scans, ultrasound images, pathology results, documentation of severe weight loss, the recommendation for urgent surgery.