I reached beneath the papers and removed the flash drive.
Clara recognized it as an ordinary storage device.
She didn’t know what it contained.
I handed it to Dr.
Patel.
“There’s an audio file on this from last night.”
Clara’s eyes widened.
“What audio file?”
I answered by repeating her own words.
“No one will trust that old woman once the evaluation is on paper.”
The color vanished from her face.
Mom closed her eyes.
Clara stared at me for several seconds.
Then anger replaced fear.
“You recorded me in my own house?”
“Our house,” I said.
“At our kitchen table.”
“You set me up.”
“No.
I asked questions.
You answered them.”
Dr.
Patel did not play the recording in front of us.
Instead, he documented its existence and told us it should be preserved for the appropriate investigators.
By then, the clinic’s social worker had arrived.
She spoke to Mom separately.
An adult protective services investigator joined by phone.
Because Mom said she did not feel safe returning home while Clara was there, we arranged for her to stay temporarily with my aunt, who lived forty minutes away.
Clara heard that and laughed bitterly.
“So now I’m being thrown out of my own home based on the story of a woman who pretended not to know what day it was?”
Mom looked at her.
“I pretended for twenty minutes.”
Her voice hardened.
“You pretended for three months.”
The clinic went silent.
That sentence was the first time I saw Clara truly lose control.
She grabbed her folder and shoved the papers inside so violently that several slid onto the floor.
One page landed near my boot.
I bent down and picked it up.
It was the draft power-of-attorney form.
At the bottom was a signature purporting to be Mom’s.
Mom stared at it.
“I never signed that.”
Neither Clara nor I moved.
Dr.
Patel immediately asked us not to handle the document any further.
Clara tried to take it from me.
I set it on the desk instead.
“That,” I said, “is going with the rest of the file.”
Clara began crying then.
Not quietly.
She said she was overwhelmed.
She said she had been abandoned while I was overseas.
She said Mom criticized everything she did.
She said she had made mistakes but never intended to steal anything.
Some of what she said may even have been emotionally true.
