‘This is your last chance,’ he said. ‘I’ve had many last chances,’ I said. ‘I always find there are more.’ They left. Cynthia’s heels were hard on the porch steps. The car started with a sound like controlled anger, and then they were gone, and the Saturday quiet came back to Carver Street. I sat very still for a moment, then I called James.
They mentioned competency, I said. a pause. I heard something similar might be coming. James said, ‘I’ve already spoken with Dr. Anita Patel, your GP at Riverside. She’s prepared to provide a comprehensive cognitive assessment on short notice. Her professional opinion will carry significant weight.
‘ Another pause. Margaret, they’re frightened. Frightened people reach for the largest weapons they can find. It doesn’t mean those weapons will work. I know, I said, and I did know. But my hands were shaking slightly as I hung up the phone, and I let them shake because there was no audience and no reason to pretend otherwise.
The fear was real, and I was not going to insult it by denying it. I sat with it for a few minutes. I let it exist. And then, and this is the part that surprised me, the fear began to change shape. Not to disappear, but to become something else, something with more weight and more direction. Anger maybe, or resolve.
The two are similar enough to be useful in the same ways. I picked up the phone again and called Dorothy, and then Linda Cho, and then James again, because there were things to prepare. They had shown me their hand. That was a mistake and I had work to do. The hearing before the Ohio Lottery Commission’s dispute resolution panel was held on a Wednesday morning in April in a conference room on the third floor of a state office building on Fourth Street.
The room had fluorescent lights and an oval table and chairs that were slightly too low. the kind of institutional furniture designed to communicate efficiency rather than comfort. There was a picture of water in the center of the table. Nobody touched it. The panel consisted of three people. A woman in her 50s named Barbara Ye, who was the commission’s senior dispute officer, a man named Harold Puit, who handled legal compliance, and a younger man whose name I don’t remember, and who seemed to be there primarily to take