“Why?” I asked, still cautious, still waiting for the complication I assumed had to be coming.
“She didn’t say,” Priya said. “Sometimes people just get tired of holding onto something. Once they realize everyone already knows they’re holding it.”
We signed the paperwork the following Tuesday. Deloris sitting across from us in Priya’s office, quieter than I’d ever seen her.
She wore a plain gray cardigan I didn’t recognize, none of her usual bright colors. Like she’d deliberately dressed to disappear a little that day.
I found myself studying her more closely than usual that morning. Searching for some sign of the woman who’d spent eleven years commanding every room she entered. That woman seemed to have stayed home. The person sitting across from us instead looked smaller, older. Genuinely uncertain in a way I’d never witnessed from her before.
Priya walked through each page methodically, giving Deloris every opportunity to ask questions or object. She asked nothing. She simply signed where indicated, her handwriting smaller and more careful than the bold. Confident signature I remembered from that first house-buying appointment eleven years earlier.
“I’m not doing this because I think I was wrong,” she said. Before signing. “I’m doing it. Because I don’t want to spend whatever years I have left fighting my own son in a courtroom.”
