At Thanksgiving My Grandmother Asked One Question That Changed Everything

She wanted to understand what had happened to me and to the property, and she wanted my help exposing what she had already begun to suspect.

She told me she had been writing monthly for three years, asking about the house, asking how I was managing, and had received nothing back. My parents had told her I was too emotionally fragile to write. She had begun to wonder.

We spent two evenings on the phone going over everything we each knew.

I told her what my life had looked like: the three jobs, the student loans that never seemed to decrease no matter how much I deposited, the credit score that kept declining, the job rejections that came without explanation from companies I had been confident about entering. She told me what she had seen when she drove to the lakeside house and found strangers at the door.

By the end of those conversations, the shape of what my family had done was clear enough to plan around. Attorney Watson had already begun the forensic work before Thanksgiving.