She did not pull out a document. She pulled out a small spiral notebook, the kind that costs a dollar, its cover soft from handling.

Marguerite was not confused. She had been keeping her own records for eleven months, because she knew exactly what her son was doing and had been too frightened to say it out loud to anyone. Every Tuesday he did not take her to the bank, she wrote down. Every withdrawal she did not authorize, she copied from the statements he thought she could not read. The furnace she could not afford to fix was in that notebook too, next to the date her son bought forty-four thousand dollars of wheels for a car that is worth four thousand.

She had washed sandwich bags her whole life. She was not muddled about money. She was terrified of her own child, and she had made herself small so he would keep visiting.

Roman left the table when she opened it. He actually left, walked out to the Camry with its ridiculous wheels and drove away, and that was the last ordinary moment any of us had with him.

The inheritance was recovered. Two hundred and thirty of the two hundred sixty-one thousand, over fourteen months, because the election form was a forgery and forgery unwinds. My library work, it turned out, was exactly the right training. I knew how to find the paper.

Roman was charged. He pleaded to the financial counts and avoided the elder abuse count because Marguerite would not testify against her son, and I have stopped being angry at her for that, because a mother’s refusal is not the same as forgiveness.

We divorced in the spring. Marguerite moved in with Delphine, who fixed the furnace the first week.

Here is what I did not expect. Marguerite calls me every Sunday. Not Delphine’s mother-in-law arrangement, mine, the ex-wife’s. She says I am the first person in years who checked whether she was confused instead of deciding she was.

She still has the notebook. She showed me a new one in October. The first page just says, in her careful hand, Things that are true.