The Christmas I Stopped Buying Their Love

I am seventy-three, not foolish. A woman doesn’t survive four decades of marriage to a stubborn farmer, a career of managing thirty eight-year-olds at once, and two years of grief alone without learning to trust the feeling in her gut. My gut told me I wasn’t being cared for anymore. I was being managed toward an exit.

So in early December, I did something I never imagined myself doing. I called Ott Pruitt, a retired county sheriff’s deputy who’d gone into private investigation work after he retired, a man Wendell had hunted with for twenty years and trusted with his life. I told Ott I didn’t want to catch anyone doing anything illegal. I just wanted to know, plainly, whether my instincts were lying to me or telling me the truth.

They were not lying to me.

Ott’s report came back nine days before Christmas, and it wasn’t dramatic, the way I suppose these things are in movies. There was no scandal, no crime, nothing a judge would ever care about. There was just a folder of quiet, patient proof. Screenshots of texts between Loveta and a real estate agent in Marceline named Cheryl, three separate ones, asking about “ballpark value on a rural property, five acres, older home, motivated seller down the line.” A printed email confirming a drive-by appraisal request, scheduled and then abruptly cancelled the day before it was due, like someone had gotten nervous about the timing. A brochure for Willow Bend Senior Living, the one with the walking trails and the dining hall photographed at golden hour, with a corner folded down and a note in Loveta’s loopy handwriting: “ask H about this after holidays, soft approach, not yet.” And beneath all of it, a single printed text Loveta had sent to a friend named Renee back in September, one Ott found through channels I didn’t ask him too many questions about and didn’t need to. It read: “Once we’re in Cape Girardeau for the job, that house is way too much for her by herself. We just have to be patient and let her come to it. Slow and steady.”