That was the whole conversation. Eleven words from her, three from me, and then I asked about her hip.
I was thirty-one. I had lost a pregnancy the previous October. I was four months from starting treatment and I did not have room in my body for one more difficult thing.
So I closed it, and she never raised it again.
And instead she went away and, over the next twenty months, quietly did every single thing I should have been doing: engaged a solicitor, restructured her entire estate, put it out of reach, and then set a trap with sixty-one thousand of her own money to find out exactly how far he would go.
An eighty-four-year-old woman ran due diligence on my husband because her granddaughter told her not to.
I have had a year with that. It does not get easier and I have stopped waiting for it to.
