Chapter 12 - Returning Home With an Officer
The next morning, I took the recording to Evelyn Price.
Evelyn had handled Walter’s estate and wore red lipstick to every meeting because she said older women were allowed to be visible. Her office smelled of paper, lemon polish, and the peppermint candies she kept in a crystal bowl for clients who needed something to do with their hands.
She listened without interrupting.
When Lauren’s voice said, “Then we get her out of the house before she does,” Evelyn’s mouth tightened.
She played the clip again.
Then she looked at me over her glasses.
“Sophia, how far do you think they will go?”
I wanted to say not far.
I wanted to say Jeffrey was still my son. That grief and money had twisted him but not destroyed him. That Lauren was manipulative, yes, but surely not dangerous.
Instead, I looked at my hands.
“I don’t know.”
Evelyn nodded once. “Then we proceed as if you don’t know.”
She told me not to confront them yet. She made copies of the recording, asked for the unsigned documents, and checked the trust protections Walter and I had built decades earlier. She also gave me one rule.
“No emotional warnings,” she said. “No speeches. No threats. People who believe they are winning become careless. Let them.”
That advice went against every instinct I had as a mother.
But by then, motherhood had already been used against me.
So I went home.
May you like
I smiled when Lauren asked where I had been.
And I let them believe I was still alone.
