The letter was from an attorney to my ex-husbands lawyer, dated November 2023, the same month his lawyer suddenly dropped everything and my custody case settled overnight. I never knew why. Now I did.
My son Harold is that attorney, Mrs. Vance said calmly. I asked him to look into your case. I had seen you on that bench in Cherokee Park, crying into my dogs fur, and I decided a woman who loved a little dog like that deserved to keep her own boy.
Lillian appeared in the sunroom doorway. She saw me, and she saw the envelope, and she demanded to know what I was doing there.
Sit down, Lillian, her mother said. Megan is not the one who has explaining to do. Harold found a few other things while he was looking.
Lillians car keys slipped out of her hand.
She had called me a gold digger to hide the fact that the only person emptying her mothers accounts was her.
Harold had found it all. The money Lillian had been quietly moving. The clients of mine she had called and frightened off. The reason she wanted a broke dog walker kept far away from an eighty-three-year-old widow was that the widow was starting to notice where her money went.
Mrs. Vance did not press charges against her own daughter. But she changed her lawyer, and her locks, and her will, and she asked me to come to tea every Tuesday at three, leash or no leash. I still go. We talk about Duffy. And my son comes with me now, which, after the year I had, is the only thing I ever really wanted.