He held my gaze for a moment.
Then he opened a drawer and removed a fresh legal pad.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s start with the cease and desist.”
The letter went out by certified mail four days later.
I know the exact date because I was the one who drafted it, and I saved a copy in the same folder where I kept the lien confirmation and the title search report and the document Leon Bassett had emailed me and the revocation of the power of attorney and the entry I had added to the incident file the day I came home from the hospital.
The folder had a name.
I had named it the way I named everything.
Reference.
My mother signed for the certified letter on a Tuesday morning. I know because the tracking confirmation arrived in my email at 9:51, and I was sitting at my desk eating a sandwich when I read it.
I saved the confirmation to the folder.
Then I went back to work.
My mother received the certified letter on a Tuesday.
She called me on Wednesday morning at 8:17.
I was already at my desk.
I had been there since 7:30, which was earlier than usual, and I had known when I sat down that the call would come that day.
The letter from Gerald’s office was precise and thorough, and left very little room for interpretation.
My mother would read it, and she would call, because she had never in her life received information she disagreed with and chosen to simply sit with it.
I picked up on the second ring.
“Meredith,” she said.
“Mom,” I said.
A brief pause. I could hear her breathing, slightly faster than normal.
“I got a letter,” she said.
“I know.”
“From a law firm.”
“I know.”
Another pause.
When she spoke again, her voice had shifted slightly into the register she used when she was working toward something.
“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” she said. “I think things have gotten complicated in a way that nobody intended, and I think if we could just talk this through like adults, we could clear all of this up without lawyers being involved.”
I let a moment pass.
Then I said, “Mom, I’m not going to argue about the letter. I want to tell you some things, and I’d like you to listen.”
She was quiet.
Which was, for her, unusual.
“On the seventh of October of last year,” I said, “I filed a mechanics lien against my property at the Wake County Register of Deeds. I also registered a transfer-on-death deed to a trust in my name, and I formally revoked the power of attorney you asked me to sign in 2021. All three of those instruments are public record. You can look them up by address or by instrument number. I can give you the instrument numbers if you need them.”
Silence.
“When you contacted Leon Bassett and asked him to list my property, he ran a title search. My name appeared on every page of that search. He called me directly because I am the owner of record and the registered legal contact for the property. He sent me a copy of the listing agreement you signed.”
I paused.
“You signed it as authorized representative. You are not my authorized representative. You have not been since October ninth of last year, when the power-of-attorney revocation was filed and sent to you by certified mail.”
Another silence. Longer.
“Meredith,” she said.
Her voice was different now. The working-toward tone was gone.
“I was trying to help.”
“I know you believe that,” I said.
“Brianna needs a car. She’s been struggling. You have equity sitting there and you’re not using it. And I just thought — I just thought that if we could move quickly while you were in the hospital and not… not make a whole thing out of it, you would see that it made sense. And we could all move forward.”
I did not respond to this.
“You would have understood eventually,” she said. “You always come around.”
That sentence landed somewhere specific.
I let it land.
I let it sit where it fell without picking it up or moving it.
“Mom,” I said, “I want to ask you something. When you were in the hospital room and you thought I was still sedated, what were you going to tell me had happened to the house?”
The pause this time was the longest yet.
“I thought we would figure it out,” she said finally.
“Figure it out.”
