“What did he do?”
Tyler covered his face with both hands and started crying. When he finally leaned toward me and whispered the answer, it was not what I had feared, but it still made my stomach drop.
“Uncle Jason keeps making Grandma sign things when you’re not here.”
For several seconds, I could not understand what he meant. Grandma was recovering from major heart surgery, heavily medicated and exhausted most of the time, so the idea of Jason bringing her paperwork immediately felt wrong.
“Sign what?”
“I don’t know.”
“What things, Tyler?”
“Papers.”
Tyler explained that Jason sometimes carried a folder upstairs whenever I left the house. One afternoon, Tyler had been sitting in Grandma’s room reading when Jason arrived with several documents and told him to go downstairs.
Tyler obeyed at first, but something about Jason’s tone made him uncomfortable. Instead of going all the way downstairs, he quietly returned and hid near the landing where he could hear what was happening inside the bedroom.
“I didn’t like how he said it.”
From the hallway, Tyler heard Jason spread several papers across Mom’s blanket. Jason repeatedly told her that the documents were only meant to let him help with things while she recovered.
