Call Me Immediately

I was smoothing the navy dress with the tiny flowers—the one my son always said made me look “distinguished”—when my phone buzzed on the dresser. The display read Robert Mitchell. He never called after business hours. He never sent texts, either. But there it was in a grey bubble:

Call me immediately.

A small thread in the weave of my life pulled loose. I pressed the call icon and lowered myself to the edge of the bed.

“Robert?” My voice sounded too loud in the little apartment I’d rented after selling the house, the cheerful yellow walls suddenly shrill.

“Margaret,” he said, clipped and breathless, as if he’d walked quickly from one room to another. “You need to sit down.”

“I am sitting.” The phone was warm against my ear. “Is it about the will? The revisions we discussed?”

“No. This is about Cassandra.” A pause, then, “About your daughter-in-law.”

A cold place opened, the way the door of a freezer does—white, still, unwelcoming. “What about Cassie?”

“She isn’t who she says she is.”

I gave a small, unladylike laugh. “Oh, Robert. I’ve known Cassie for more than a year. She’s a pediatric nurse, grew up in Colorado, lost her parents in a car accident when she was twenty-five. James met her at a fundraiser and—”

“There’s no record of a Cassandra Williams at Children’s Hospital. Not now, not ever. And that’s the most verifiable fact in her story.” He exhaled. “I’m telling you this because… my investigator found enough to make me think you should go to your son’s house. Don’t call first. Don’t warn her. Just go.”

The dress slipped from my hands to the carpet. Outside my window, a maple tree shivered gently, the red feeder swaying. The cardinals that had been such company in winter seemed like a scene from a life playing in another room.

“Robert,” I whispered. “What do you think is happening?”

“I think she’s preparing a final move. And I think you can stop it if you leave now.”

There are moments in life that feel rehearsed only in retrospect. You remember the way you grabbed the keys—how they slipped, how you caught them by the teeth. You recall the glare on the windshield that made you squint. Above all, you remember your hands on the steering wheel, how they trembled and then steadied around the leather as if your palms decided you were done being fragile.

I drove.

The sun had adjusted to that late-afternoon gold that makes even ordinary neighborhoods look staged, like movie sets. My son’s new house had that sheen: squared hedges, porch lanterns that were probably timed, a front walk the color of latte foam. Behind James’s BMW, I sat for a moment and looked at the window above the sink where light softened to honey. Two figures drifted back and forth like familiar ghosts. My son laughed at something. A woman’s head moved toward his shoulder, then away. If I hadn’t known why I’d come, I would have thought: they’re happy.

I rang the bell.

The door yanked open and there was my boy—forty-two, but the grin was still sixteen, and his hug was the kind that sounds like Mom more than it says it.

“You are perfect,” he said. “She’s making lasagna, the famous one. Come in.”

Cassandra—Cassie—emerged from the kitchen wearing a floral apron over impeccable jeans. Blond hair, loose and glossy. She’d always known how to choose a version of herself that landed softly in rooms. She hugged me, brisk and warm, calling me “Mom Thompson” like she had since the engagement.

“I opened the Pinot Grigio you brought last time,” she said brightly. “We’ll eat in twenty. I made fresh bread.”

“Lovely,” I said. My voice skimmed the surface of the evening like a pebble thrown just right—too fast to sink.

We crossed the living room, and the first fissure appeared to me. The room was perfect, yes, but perfectly her. Nothing of James. No college pennant he pretended not to care about. No antique clock his father had repaired and left him. Not even the painting he’d loved from our old house—a messy, beautiful thing with thick blue paint that looked like water in a dream.

“Cassie has remarkable taste,” I said, like someone commenting idly on the weather, like someone not looking for a seam.

“She does,” James said, and then hesitated. “My old stuff made it look like a bachelor pad.”

But his smile didn’t reach his eyes. Behind the grin, there was a fatigue I recognized—a sediment of worry at the bottom of a glass.

“James,” I said gently. “A word?”

Cassie appeared again, as if she’d been folded into the doorway the entire time. “Everything okay?”

“Fine, sweetheart,” I said. “Just want to ask him about his presentation next week. The one with the difficult client.”

Her expression tightened for a fraction of a second, then smoothed. She nodded and retreated. James led me to his office and closed the door.

It smelled like him—cedar, printer ink, a ghost of the cologne he wore to important meetings. Here, at least, his things remained—books stacked imperfectly, a mug with a chip he refused to throw away, notes pinned to corkboard with mismatched tacks.

“Mom,” he said, uneasy now, “what’s wrong?”

“How much do you know about Cassie’s past?” I asked.

He blinked. Relief crossed his face so quickly it hurt to see. “Why?”

“Answer me first.”

He sat, elbows on knees. “She grew up in Denver. Parents died in a car accident when she was twenty-five. She worked through nursing school. She moved here three years ago to start fresh. She—” He stopped, eyes shifting to the side as if he could see the edges of the story and they were blurry. “Why?”

“Have you seen photos? Of family, graduation, friends from school?”

“She says it’s too painful. The accident.”

“Have you visited her at work?”

“The hospital has policies about visitors on the pediatric ward.” He rubbed his jaw. “Mom, what is this?”

I showed him Robert’s text. “There’s no record of her at the hospital. And my attorney’s investigator thinks Cassandra Williams may not exist at all.”

“I hear her take patient calls,” he said, then closed his mouth around the sentence. “Except… she takes them in the other room.”

“And have you met colleagues?”

His silence was answer enough.

I laid a manila folder on the desk—the one Robert had sent a courier to deliver while I was driving over. “Her real name is Catherine Blackwood.” I kept my voice low, steady. “She’s thirty-four. She’s been married twice under other names. In both marriages, she siphoned funds and disappeared.”

James stared at the papers as if they were pages from a play he’d been in without knowing it. “No,” he whispered. Then louder, “No.”

Before I could answer, the kitchen timer sounded, a cheery ping. “Dinner’s ready!” Cassie called.

We walked back down the hall together. He kept pace with me like a boy keeping up beside his mother, careful not to run, careful not to fall.

The dining table gleamed. My gift of china—my mother’s china, really—sat at each place, the scalloped plates arranged with precision. The lasagna looked like something from a magazine. The bread cracked when she sliced it. She poured wine and raised her glass.

“To us,” she said. “To family.”

“To family,” I echoed.

Through dinner I watched, not rudely, but closely. The way she cut her lasagna—measured, exact, as if she were dividing a resource that had to last. The contradicting softness of her voice and the sharpness of her eyes when she thought no one noticed. I saw—for the first time, I saw—how each sentence she spoke was a tiny thread tugged here or there to move the fabric of the evening.

“So, Mom Thompson,” she said lightly, “how’s the new apartment? I hope you don’t regret selling the old place.”

“It’s fine,” I said. I dabbed my mouth with a napkin. “Though I realized we never really accounted for the money. I contributed thirty-five thousand to the wedding. But I gave you two fifty-thousand disbursements total. What happened to the extra fifteen?”

James looked up slowly. Cassie’s fork paused midair.

“There were expenses,” she said after a beat. “House improvements. The honeymoon. My student loans.”

“I thought,” I said, “you worked your way through school.”

She adjusted her tone, layered it with embarrassment. “I had to borrow for my final year.”

“Funny,” James said, quiet but suddenly sure, “because you told the mortgage broker you had no debt.”

A tic moved in her jaw—a tiny pulse. Then she smiled again and stood. “Excuse me. I need to check dessert.”

She retreated to the kitchen. Cabinets opened and closed. Water ran. Then there was silence, an intentional kind. You can always tell.

“Mom,” James murmured, “what else is in that folder?”

“That the fifteen thousand didn’t go to loans. It went to an account in Phoenix. Robert’s investigator believes it belongs to a woman using the last name Blackwood.”

He swallowed. “Her sister?”

“The one who died in the car accident with her parents,” I said softly.

We both turned our heads at the same moment, animal-like. The back door stood slightly ajar.

“She’s gone,” he said. He moved to the front window. “Her car is still here.”

“Then there’s another,” I said. “Come back.” I spotted Cassie’s phone on the table. It was unlocked. She’d never been careless about her devices before, but the adrenaline of flight… I opened Messages. A thread with Marcus stared back.

The old lady is getting suspicious. How much longer?

Account in Phoenix needs more time.

And from earlier that day:

Emergency: she hired a PI. Need extraction plan now.

I showed James. He sat down as if someone had removed his bones.

The police arrived twenty minutes later, but for us, the arrest had already happened. A story had been captured. A character had fallen apart and left only Catherine behind.

Detective Rodriguez, sharp-eyed, efficient, took the phone, logged it as evidence. “You probably saved your son from losing everything,” she said to me. “These fraud marriages escalate quickly once the beneficiary papers are signed.”

James stared at the insurance forms on the counter—forms Cassie had set out for him to sign after dinner, forms naming each other as primary beneficiaries. “She said it was… romantic,” he muttered.

“Nothing says love like a million-dollar payout,” I said before I could stop myself. Detective Rodriguez gave the smallest smile.

They took statements. They collected the forms. When everyone left, the house felt like a stage after the audience had gone—a few paper programs in the aisles, an echo under the high ceiling.

James looked at me. “Be honest,” he said. “Did you ever really like her?”

“I liked who I thought she was,” I said. “And I ignored the parts that didn’t fit. That’s the same as liking someone, sometimes. It’s dangerous.”

He nodded and rubbed his face with his hands. “What do we do now?”

“Now,” I said, “we sleep. Tomorrow we talk to Robert.”

Robert’s office was not itself the next morning. The calm had been replaced with a purposeful clutter—open files, coffee that had gone cold, a whiteboard with names and arrows. Beside him sat a man with precise hair and an expression that suggested he had been born taking notes.

“Margaret, James,” Robert said, “this is Detective Frank Morrison with the Multi-State Financial Crimes Task Force.”

Morrison shook our hands. “Mrs. Thompson,” he said, “your instincts and your timing might have just cracked the spine of a multi-state operation.”

He showed us photographs—Catherine with brown hair at a courthouse; Catherine with red hair at a beach wedding; Catherine with a sleek black bob in a driver’s license photo that looked too polished to be a DMV portrait. He spread them like a deck of cards you’d rather not play with.

“Seventeen confirmed victims,” he said. “We suspect more. Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and now here. Conservative estimate of total funds siphoned: over two million.”

James blew out a breath. “God.”

Morrison tapped one photo—the newest. “Here’s what’s different in your case. She stayed longer. She embedded. Our theory? You, Mrs. Thompson, were the endgame. Your savings, the life insurance from your late husband, the house proceeds, the investments—”

“—which she asked me about last week,” I said. “She wanted to know if I’d considered including my daughter-in-law specifically in my will.”

Robert’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. Morrison’s pen stopped moving. “That fits,” he said. “Which brings us to the reason I’m here: we’d like to set a trap.”

“No,” James said, quick as lightning. “Absolutely not. You’re not using my mother as bait.”

“It’s my decision,” I said, surprising myself with the firmness of it. I looked at Morrison. “Tell me.”

He outlined it: a message routed through one of Catherine’s shell references—a “nurse” who verified her employment to landlords and lenders—inviting Cassie to coffee. The tone would be concerned, not accusatory. I would be the mother who didn’t understand what had gone wrong, who wanted to help fix the marriage. If she took the bait, we’d coax her into revealing enough to secure charges that would stick, with officers nearby and ready.

“She won’t resist,” Morrison said. “She thinks there’s still money to be had, and she believes she can outtalk you.”

James stared at the table. “You can’t guarantee her safety.”

Morrison nodded. “No plan is risk-free. But we’ll control the environment.”

I touched my son’s hand. “Honey, I have spent fifteen years alone since your father died. I have learned to buy my own tires, handle contractors, navigate hospitals, read insurance policies until the words look like knitting. I can do this.”

He looked at me, then away, then back. “I hate this,” he said. “I hate that you have to be the brave one.”

“I prefer clever,” I said. “Brave implies fear. I mostly feel tired.”

We chose a coffee shop downtown where the baristas wore beanies too warm for the weather and the pastries had names like “pluot galette.” Morrison’s team arrived early and settled into corners with laptops. I sat at a small round table by the window with a mug I didn’t want and a hand that wouldn’t stop smoothing the napkin.

She arrived at two on the dot. Dark hair now, pulled back. Less makeup. Clothes that said struggle without shouting it. She moved as if she had rehearsed this walk for a mirror: tentative, hopeful, wounded.

“Mom Thompson,” she breathed, eyes shining. “Thank you for meeting me.”

“Of course,” I said, standing to hug her. I could smell a perfume I didn’t recognize, something powdery, like new baby blankets or an old friend’s linen closet. She sat, folded her hands, and began to cry in a way that kept the tears in the eyes without letting them fall.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “James changed—he became controlling, suspicious of everything. He… he said terrible things.”

“What things?” I asked, gentle as remembered lullabies.

“That I lied about the hospital, about my family, about… about everything.” She shook her head. “He called the hospital pretending to be someone else, trying to get them to verify my employment. When they wouldn’t, he decided I must not work there at all. You know how hospitals are about privacy.”

“Mmm,” I said, as if tasting a familiar soup. “And the bank transfers?”

She tilted her head. “What bank transfers?”

“The fifteen thousand to Phoenix,” I said. “He’s quite sure about it. Maybe if you could explain, he’d calm down.”

Her expression stilled. It was like watching a candle blow itself out. The softness vanished. The face that remained was… economical. Efficient. A face that had done this before and would do it again unless someone changed the script.

“How much do you really know?” she asked, voice flat now. No endearments, no “Mom Thompson.”

“Enough,” I said. “More than you hoped.”

“You have no idea what you’re up against.” She leaned forward, low and even. “James was a project. You were the payday.”

“I suppose you should be flattered that you misjudged me,” I said, and gestured just slightly to the room.

Detective Morrison appeared as if he’d risen from inside the floor. Two other officers stood from distant tables. Catherine barely flicked her eyes toward them.

“Catherine Blackwood,” Morrison said, and presented a badge that made the baristas stop pretending to tamp espresso. “You’re under arrest for fraud, identity theft, and conspiracy to commit financial elder abuse. You have the right—”

“I know my rights,” she said, standing smoothly. “And you won’t prove half of what you think.”

“We only need enough,” he said, and the cuffs glinted.

She looked at me then, really looked, and for a moment I saw something naked and skittering behind her pupils—anger, yes, but also a shard of respect. She’d expected tears. She’d expected a mother-in-law collapsing into the safety of the story she wanted. She hadn’t expected me.

“This isn’t over,” she said softly as they walked her toward the door.

“It is,” I said. “For us.”

When the door closed and the bell above it settled back into silence, I suddenly realized that the coffee had gone cold and my hand had stopped smoothing the napkin.

James was across the street, waiting per Morrison’s instructions. He crossed now and entered, the bell chiming again.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Ask me in an hour,” I said.

He took my hand. “Mom, you were—”

“Clever,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

The months that followed were a bureaucratic symphony—depositions, statements, account freezes, dull rooms with walls the color of oatmeal. There were good days when Detective Rodriguez or Morrison would call with new progress. There were bad days when someone said “jurisdictional” or “limited recovery” and I wanted to put my fist through the polite drywall.

But there were ordinary days, too. I bought a small house I loved because I loved it—a place with creaking floors that sounded like a conversation and a backyard that sloped just enough to make mowing an accomplishment. I rehung the messy blue painting and put the chipped mug where I could see it. I did not buy a new set of china.

James began to return to himself like a man warming after a winter swim. At first, he spoke about Cassie—Catherine—in the past tense and caught himself, wincing. Then he spoke of her less and less, replacing the ghost with other things: the client who laughed like a goose; the squash league; a podcast about cities; and, once, awkwardly but honestly, the name of a therapist.

“Do you feel stupid?” he asked me one evening as we shelled peas on my porch. The sky had that southwest violet that can make you emotional if you stare too long.

“Yes,” I said. “But I’ve decided to feel stupid on purpose. It’s a cheaper price than bitterness.”

He smiled without looking up. “When did you get wise?”

“I’ve always been wise,” I said. “You’ve only recently become capable of appreciating it.”

He laughed—really laughed—and it was a sound I’d missed without knowing just how much.

One morning, a text from Robert blinked into my phone: Final restitution hearing scheduled. Likely recovery ~60%.

I showed James. “That’s better than we expected,” he said. “What will you do with it?”

I thought about that for a while. “Give some to a fund for fraud victims. Take some to a beach where no one knows me. Buy fruit in a market and eat it on a balcony without explaining myself to anyone.”

“Invite me,” he said lightly, then, more sincerely, “Please.”

“You bring the beanies-too-warm-for-the-weather baristas’ coffee,” I said. “I’ll bring the sunscreen.”

“Deal.”

A week later, a letter arrived addressed in tidy, uncertain handwriting. Inside was a note from a man in Colorado—one of Morrison’s “seventeen.” He wrote that he’d sat in his car outside a grocery store and cried when he read the newspaper summary of Catherine’s arrest. He said he’d felt less alone and more embarrassed at the same time. He said it helped to know a mother had fought back.

I folded the letter and slid it into a drawer with recipes, ticket stubs, and other proofs that lives are made of small, categorically unimportant things. Then I sat on the step and called my son.

“She picked men who wanted to believe in love,” James said into the afternoon. “She picked mothers who wanted their sons to be happy. There’s something almost… scientific about it.”

“Yes,” I said. “But science has margins of error.” I smiled at my yard. “And sometimes, it gets peer-reviewed.”

“Mom,” he said, amused, “did you just compare your common sense to the scientific method?”

“My common sense passed double-blind trials,” I said. “Don’t disrespect it.”

He laughed. “I’m proud of you.”

“I’m proud of me, too,” I said, surprising myself. “That’s new.”

Six months after the arrest, we sat on the deck of my small house and watched the day drain away in quiet colors. The trial loomed; there would be more rooms, more statements, more words like “evidentiary” and “proffer.” But tonight there was just a plate of sliced peaches and a glass of water sweating into a ring on the table.

“Do you ever miss her?” James asked suddenly.

“The person I thought she was?” I asked back.

He nodded.

“Yes,” I said. “But I think what I miss was a future I invented. We grieved people we wanted to be real. That grief is honest, even if the person wasn’t.”

He considered that. “She was very good,” he said quietly. “Too good.”

“Very practiced,” I said. “There’s a difference.”

He leaned back, folding his arms behind his head. “I keep replaying moments. Tiny things. The way she shut down questions with vulnerability. How she always had a reason not to introduce me to anyone from her ‘past.’ How she wanted your house sold immediately, but framed it as concern for you. I feel like I saw it and didn’t.”

“You saw what you could afford to see,” I said. “We all do. The trick is to forgive the version of yourself who didn’t know yet.”

He looked at me. “And you? Are you forgiving yourself?”

I glanced at the messy blue painting through the window. “Yes,” I said. “I was busy surviving. Now I’m practicing something else.”

“What?”

“Living,” I said. “Clumsily, expensively, deliciously.”

He grinned. “You’re going to be insufferable on that beach.”

“I plan to make friends with a woman named Gloria who wears bright sarongs and says things like ‘darling’ without irony,” I said. “We’ll discuss novels neither of us finish.”

“Save me a chair,” he said.

“Always.”

The day of the restitution hearing, a clerk with a ponytail read numbers in a voice that made them sound like grocery items. Catherine sat at the defense table wearing a severe suit and a face that had nothing to do with me anymore. When she glanced back, it was like a stranger checking the time on a public clock. I realized then that the story I’d been in with her had chapters I would not read. I was a character in one of her books. She was a villain in one of mine. But on the shelf of the world, there were other books and other shelves and other readers.

Afterward, outside the courthouse steps where pigeons conduct their own small hearings, Detective Rodriguez found us.

“You did good, Mrs. Thompson,” she said. “Some days we run very hard and catch nothing. Some days the net comes up heavy.”

“Some days the fish jump in,” I said. “And complain about the temperature of the boat.”

She laughed—really laughed—and I liked her even more for it.

Morrison shook my hand. “If you’re ever bored, we could use consultants who actually understand people.”

“Pay my rate in pluot galettes,” I said. “I’m expensive.”

“Done.”

The beach—when we finally went—was ordinary and beautiful the way true things often are. We rented a little place with a balcony that faced a sea the color of old glass. Each morning we walked to the market where the fruit thrummed with sweetness under our thumbs. In the afternoons we read paperbacks we did not intend to finish. At sunset, we talked, or we didn’t. Silence among the honest is a different kind of quiet.

One evening, as the tide curled in a white hem along the sand, James cleared his throat.

“There’s someone,” he said. “Someone I met at the squash courts. Her name is Priya.”

“Good name,” I said. “Solid consonants.”

“She’s… direct,” he said, smiling. “She doesn’t let me get away with anything.”

“Promise me one thing,” I said. “Don’t mistake mystery for depth. Ask for details. Expect photographs. Meet friends. Visit workplaces. Eat at their favorite terrible takeout. Look under rugs for dust.”

He nodded. “I will.”

“And if she has a mother,” I added, straight-faced, “be very nice to her. She might be the clever one.”

He laughed into the wind. “I learned from the best.”

We watched the horizon take the sun like a secret. I thought of the woman who had tried to script my life and my son’s, and how we had refused to memorize the lines. I thought of the younger version of me who had believed women like that were only in movies. I thought of all the small choices that had led to this chair, this salt on my lips, this son beside me who had almost disappeared into a careful story someone else was telling.

“Mom,” he said, soft as the water. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For not being afraid to be the person who ends the scene,” he said. “For calling cut.”

I squeezed his hand. “That’s my job,” I said. “I’m the director.”

We sat until the stars stitched themselves into the dark. Later, I texted Robert a photograph of the sea and thanked him for sending the first message that had unraveled everything and saved what mattered. He sent back a thumbs-up emoji I knew he’d selected with the gravity of a man signing a mortgage.

Back in my little house, months afterward, I still sometimes woke in the thin hours and thought of Cassie’s hands poised above the cutting board, the perfect arrangement of forks, the linen napkins folded into doves. Then I remembered that I’d donated part of the restitution to a clinic that helped older adults navigate scams of every kind, and with the rest I’d bought a lawn chair that reclined with a satisfying click and a pair of sandals that made me taller than my own history.

On the wall, the blue painting glowed softly. It looked like water and sky and something else—something messy and stubborn and alive.

Like me.

“Goodnight, Margaret,” I told the room, and the room, wise from listening, told me goodnight back.