“It’s just so I can help with everything while you recover.”
My stomach tightened as Tyler described Grandma repeatedly asking Jason where she needed to sign. That detail disturbed me because Mom had been taking strong medication since the surgery and often struggled to remember conversations from earlier in the day.
“What did Grandma say?”
“She kept asking where to sign.”
“Was she awake?”
Tyler hesitated before answering.
“Kind of.”
That answer frightened me more than anything else he had said. Tyler explained that Grandma signed several pages before Jason quickly folded them, put them back into the folder, and left the room.
Then Tyler revealed something even worse. Jason had returned to the house late one night while I was asleep and used the spare key I had given him.
“He came back once when you were asleep.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“He used his key.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
Tyler wiped his face with the edge of his blanket. His answer hit me harder than I expected because it forced me to remember the conversation I had dismissed only days earlier.
“I thought you’d get mad because you told me to stop following him.”
I realized then that Tyler had tried to warn me long before that night, but I had interpreted his behavior as anxiety and possessiveness instead of listening to what he was actually showing me. He explained that Jason had gone into Grandma’s bedroom and told her she had signed one of the documents in the wrong place.
That was why Tyler had begun sleeping outside her door. He had been trying to stay awake every night so Jason could not come back without someone noticing.
