Deputy Attorney General Renata Ochoa opened that door. I served with her mother in Alaska in 1989, and I have known Renata since she was seven years old. She had been sitting in the next booth for forty minutes with the elder financial abuse unit’s investigator, and everything Curtis said was inside a recording he handed to her afterward. Weston Clay surrendered his license eleven months later. Glen and Paulette settled quietly. Curtis was not prosecuted, because I asked her not to, and that was the hardest decision of my life.

He has not spoken to me in three years. I still send a card on his birthday, and I still mean every word I write in it.

The laundromats run under a trust now with my granddaughter Imani as trustee. She is twenty-six, she asks questions before she assumes, and last spring she caught a payroll error I had missed.

I built all of it with my own hands and my own savings. At seventy-one I finally understood that refusing to be diminished is not stubbornness. It is simply telling the truth about who you are.