But I had one advantage in the entire world, and it was the single thing Ashton didn’t know: I could see. If I confronted him, I’d lose it. He’d move the timeline up, or run that day, or destroy the papers. My sight was my only weapon, and a weapon only works if the other person doesn’t know you’re holding it.
So I became, for three days, the most convincing blind woman who ever lived.
I let Ashton guide my hand to my coffee cup. I stared at the wrong corner of the room when he spoke. I let him sigh and call me helpless, and I said thank you in the soft, grateful voice he expected, while behind my blurry, recovering eyes I memorized every single thing.
And in the hours he was at work, I moved.
I photographed every page in that suitcase with my phone, magnified, readable. I went back to my eye specialist and had him document, in writing, with a date, that my vision was returning and that I was fully cognitively capable of managing my own affairs — destroying the « unable to manage » lie at the center of the forged power of attorney. I took the photographs and the doctor’s letter to a lawyer of my own, a woman named Reyes who looked at the forged signatures and the three-day closing and got very, very focused.
« Sutton, » she said, « this is forgery, fraud, and the attempted theft of separate property from a vulnerable adult. The signatures alone end him. But the house sale closes in three days, and he’s listed as your attorney-in-fact. We need to be there. In person. And we need to stop it in the room, in front of the notary and the buyer, so there is no version where he talks his way out later. »
« In the room, » I said.
« Can you do that? See him? After everything? »
I thought about two years of darkness, and the first clear thing waiting at the end of it.
« I’ve been waiting two years to look him in the eye, » I said. « I’d like it to be worth the wait. »
