Sign the house over to your brother, Mom, before this little leech bleeds you

I pulled my folder out slowly, the way you draw a curtain before a storm. “Before Mom signs anything, Megan, I think the family should see this.” Megan rolled her eyes. “Spare us the drama, Eva.” Our brother Daniel leaned forward anyway. I laid the pages on the tray table. Bank statements. Wire transfers. Forty-seven thousand dollars siphoned from Mom’s savings over eighteen months, every transaction routed to an LLC registered in Megan’s husband’s name. A second-mortgage application on Mom’s house, dated three weeks ago, with a signature that wasn’t Mom’s. And a letter from Mom’s oncologist, addressed to me, naming me as her medical and financial power of attorney. Signed eleven months ago. Notarized. Filed. Megan’s face went the color of the hospital walls. “You — you went behind my back —” “No,” I said quietly. “I sat beside her bed. You were the one behind her back.” Daniel picked up the mortgage application, read the forged signature, and set it down like it burned him. “Megan. What did you do.” Mom reached for my hand, and her grip was stronger than it had been in months. “Read the last page, sweetheart,” she whispered. I did. It was a new will. Drafted last week. Witnessed by her nurse and her priest. The house, the savings, every last teacup in the china cabinet — left to me. With one line at the bottom, in Mom’s shaky cursive: *To Megan, I leave the lesson she refused to learn from me: that love is not a transaction.* Megan started to cry, the loud performative kind, reaching for Mom’s arm. Mom turned her face toward the window. “Please leave, Megan. The grown-ups are talking.” Security walked her out at 7:14 p.m. I stayed until morning, the way I always had. Mom squeezed my hand once before she slept and murmured, “You were never the leech, baby. You were the roots.”