We hired her. We let her into his home. We thought she was helping. She was waiting.

I need to say something upfront. I did not handle this well. I am not going to tell this story like I was calm and measured because I was not. I am still not.

My father-in-law’s name was Gerald. He was 81. He had Parkinson’s for six years and it had gotten bad in the last two — the tremors, the shuffling, the moments where he’d forget where he was for a few seconds. But his mind was mostly there. He could tell you the score of every Packers game from 1967. He could still beat my husband at Scrabble if you gave him enough time.

I’m Megan. I’m the daughter-in-law. My husband Peter is Gerald’s youngest. Peter has an older sister, Colleen, who lives in Wisconsin, and an older brother, Dennis, who lives about an hour from us. We’re in Michigan. Gerald’s house was twenty minutes from our place.

About eighteen months before Gerald died, we decided he needed help. The falls were getting worse. He’d left the stove on twice. Peter and I researched home care agencies. We interviewed four people. We picked Lorene.

Lorene was fifty-five. Soft voice. Good references. She’d worked with elderly patients for years. She was supposed to do meals, medication management, light housekeeping, and companionship. She moved into Gerald’s spare bedroom.

At first it was fine. Gerald seemed happier. He was eating better. Lorene would text us updates. “Gerald had a good day today.” “We went for a walk to the mailbox.” “He ate all his dinner.” Little things that made us feel like we’d made the right call.

Then the visits got harder.

I’d drive over and Lorene would meet me at the door. “He’s napping.” “He had a rough morning, maybe come back tomorrow.” “The doctor said too many visitors tire him out.” I’d leave groceries and go. Peter tried calling and the phone would ring and ring. He figured his dad just wasn’t hearing it.

Colleen called me in October, confused. She said Gerald’s phone number had been changed. She’d been calling the old number for weeks. I said that’s weird and called the house. Lorene answered and gave me a new number. She said Gerald requested it because of spam calls. That made sense at the time. I don’t know why I didn’t question it more.

Gerald died on a Sunday in January. Lorene called Peter at 6 AM. She said she found him in bed. He’d passed in his sleep. Peaceful, she said. Peter drove over. By the time I got there, Lorene had already called the funeral home. She had the paperwork ready. She knew which funeral home Gerald wanted. She had his suit picked out.

At the time I thought she was being efficient and kind. Now I think she had been planning.

The will reading was four days after the funeral. Gerald’s lawyer, a guy named Howard who’d handled his affairs for fifteen years, was not the one who conducted the reading. A different lawyer showed up. She said Gerald had retained her office three days before his death to draft a new will.

The new will left the house, all bank accounts, the investment portfolio, the truck, and all personal property to Lorene Marie Foss.

Peter stood up so fast his chair fell backwards. Colleen started saying “no, no, no” like she couldn’t process the words. Dennis just sat there with his mouth open.

I asked the lawyer if Gerald had come to her office to sign this. She said no. She came to the house. Lorene had called her.

I asked if Gerald was alone when he signed. She paused. She said Lorene was present.

She was IN THE ROOM when a man with advanced Parkinson’s who could barely grip a spoon allegedly signed away $2 million.

There’s a thing Peter told me later that I keep coming back to. He said when he’d finally gotten through to his dad on the phone about a month before he died, Gerald said “I thought you all forgot about me.” Peter said “Dad, I call every day.” And Gerald went quiet and said “Lorene said nobody calls.”

She told him his children stopped calling. She changed the number so they couldn’t reach him. She met visitors at the door and turned them away. She built a wall around a sick, lonely old man and she waited until he believed she was the only person left.

I started looking into her. I couldn’t help it. I work in insurance so I know how to pull records and I know people who know people.

Lorene previously worked for an elderly woman in Ohio. That woman changed her will eight months before she died. Left a significant portion to Lorene. The family contested but settled out of court.

Before Ohio, she worked for an elderly man in Indiana. Same pattern. Changed his will. No family present during the revision. The family got nothing.

Three elderly people in two states. The same woman. The same playbook.

We hired an elder law attorney. He said the word is “undue influence.” It means someone in a position of trust used that position to manipulate a vulnerable person’s decisions. He also used the word “predator” but that was off the record.

The case is ongoing. The original lawyer Howard is cooperating. He says Gerald never mentioned wanting to change his will in their fifteen years of working together. The new lawyer says she was just following client instructions.

There’s also this — and honestly I wasn’t going to mention it but whatever. When we went through Gerald’s things, we found a stack of birthday cards in a drawer. Cards Peter and Colleen and Dennis had sent over the past year. Unopened. The envelopes were slit open on one side and re-sealed with tape. She opened them, read them, and resealed them. She never gave them to him.

He died thinking no one cared. His birthday cards were in a drawer twelve feet from his bed and he never saw them.

Peter doesn’t talk about it much. He’ll be fine and then he’ll just stop what he’s doing for a minute and stare at nothing and I know he’s thinking about the calls his father never received.

The Progresso soup isn’t relevant but Gerald loved the minestrone kind. We found eleven cans in his pantry. Lorene had been buying him the kind he liked. That’s the thing that makes me the angriest and I know that doesn’t make sense. She bought him the soup he liked. She learned his favorite things so he would trust her. That’s how you take everything from a person.

We’re going to court in April. Our lawyer thinks we have a strong case. I think we do too. But even if we win, Gerald still died alone thinking his children abandoned him. You can’t litigate that. There’s no settlement for what she took from him in his last year.

I drove past his house last week. The spare bedroom blinds were still closed. I don’t know why I noticed that.