The card belonged to Mr. Ellison, the estate attorney my late husband and I had used for thirty years, the one man Trevor and Delphine never thought to consider. Three months earlier, when I first noticed the whispered conversations and the half-hidden paperwork, I had gone to see him quietly. And what he told me changed everything. The transfer of the house had contained a clause my son never read, a life estate that gave me the legal right to live there until my death, a right that could not be sold or signed away, and which their treatment of me had just spectacularly violated.

I dialed his office from the cashier’s phone, standing in the freezing wind, and when he answered I said only, “Mr. Ellison, it’s Josephine. They’ve done it. They left me at a gas station on the interstate.” There was a pause, then his steady voice. “Josephine, don’t move. I’m sending someone, and I’m filing first thing tomorrow. They have made a very serious mistake.”