Chapter 7: What the Printer Remembered
The printer log showed four entries across two visits.
Andre pulled it up on his laptop while Marcus sat beside him at Loretta's kitchen table.
Patricia stood behind them both, reading over their shoulders.
Loretta sat at the end of the table with fresh tea she was actually drinking this time.
The entries were time-stamped.
Visit one, six weeks earlier: two documents scanned, eleven minutes apart.
Visit two, eight days ago: one document printed, one document scanned.
"The scan from visit one," Marcus said, leaning closer.
"That would be when she photographed your mother's existing financial documents.
Account numbers.
Routing numbers.
Signature pages." He straightened up.
"She was building the profile."
"And visit two," Andre said.
"She printed the power of attorney.
Already drafted, already formatted.
She brought it on her phone or a USB drive, printed it here, and had your mother sign it in her own home using her own printer." Marcus looked at Loretta.
"Did she ask to use the printer that day?"
"She said she needed to print directions home," Loretta said.
"I told her she was welcome."
The table was quiet for a moment.
"She printed the directions too," Patricia said, almost to herself.
"One page of directions.
So if anyone ever asked, your mother would remember a reason."
Andre looked at his mother.
Loretta set her mug down very carefully on the table.
"I made her a sandwich," Loretta said.
"Mom—"
"A turkey sandwich.
I cut it the way I used to cut yours, into triangles." She shook her head once, not in distress but in something colder and more final.
"She sat in my kitchen and ate my food and printed documents to steal from me."
No one said anything.
"All right," Loretta said, in a voice that had made a decision.
"What do you need from me?"
Marcus walked her through it methodically.
A formal statement.
Written consent to access her bank records.
A list of every date she could remember Simone being in the house, cross-referenced against the printer log.
An authorization allowing Marcus to contact her financial institutions directly.
Loretta answered every question without hesitation.
Her handwriting as she signed each consent form was the same controlled cursive she had used for sixty-one years.
Andre's phone rang at twenty past eleven.
He stepped into the hallway.
"It's Marcus's contact at the carrier," Patricia said from the table, loud enough for him to hear.
He answered.
It wasn't the carrier.
It was Simone.
"We need to talk," she said.
Her voice was careful.
Level.
"Not through attorneys.
Just us."
Andre said nothing.
"I know what Marcus is doing," she said.
"I know what you think happened.
But there are things you don't understand yet, Andre.
Things about Hargrove that I didn't know until it was too late." A pause.
"He used me.
He told me the documents were procedural.
He said it was standard estate planning language.
I didn't know he had changed them."
"You visited my mother four times in three months," Andre said.
Silence.
"You printed a document on her printer and told her it was directions."
The silence stretched longer.
"Whatever Hargrove told you to say," Andre said, "it's not going to work.
Because we have the printer log.
We have your phone's location data for every date my mother remembers you being here.
And we have a bank account with your fingerprints on the paper trail, even if your name isn't on it." He waited.
"Is there anything else?"
She breathed.
Once, slow.
"I didn't want it to go this far," she said.
And her voice, for just that moment, sounded like something real.
Like something that might once have been true before it got buried under everything else she had decided to become.
"Give the ring back," Andre said.
"Today.
To my mother's door.
No message."
"Andre—"
"If it's not there by four o'clock, I'll add it to the list." He paused.
"Marcus is going to file tomorrow.
Whether the ring is there or not."
He ended the call and stood in the hallway for a moment, his back against the wall, looking at the framed photographs Loretta had hung in a line going up the stairs.
Him at eight years old.
Him at his graduation.
His parents on their anniversary, the year before his father got sick.
He walked back into the kitchen.
"She'll try to put it all on Hargrove," he said.
"Let her," Marcus said.
"We're filing against both of them.
If they'd like to spend the next two years fighting each other while we build the case, that suits us very well."
At three forty-seven, Loretta's doorbell rang.
Andre opened the door.
There was no one there.
Only a small envelope on the doorstep, unsealed.
Inside it, on a fold of tissue paper, was his grandmother's ring.
He brought it to Loretta.
She took it from him without speaking, slid it onto her right hand where she had always worn it, and looked at it for a long time.
May you like
Then she looked up at her son.
"Now let's finish this," she said.
