I’m not alone, I said. There was a quality to the silence that followed that I can only describe as recalibration. He had assumed my isolation. He had built his strategy on it. A 74year-old woman living alone, recently expelled from her own home, facing a legal battle against her only son. He had imagined that scenario as one in which I would eventually inevitably become tired enough to accept whatever he offered.
He had not counted on Dorothy Haynes or on Pastor Williams at Grace Methodist, who had quietly connected me with the church’s legal advocacy volunteers, two of whom had specific experience with elder financial exploitation cases and had already reviewed my situation informally and expressed their confidence in James Whitmore’s strategy.