I spent 6 hours cooking Thanksgiving dinner. At 7 pm, my son arrived with 6 guests from my daughter-in-law’s family. They sat down like they owned my home. My DIL said, “Would you mind eating in the kitchen, Dad?” I just smiled and walked into the kitchen… what I did next had everyone screaming. – usnews

A Tuesday in April when she reorganized the pantry without mentioning it and I spent 20 minutes looking for the olive oil.

A Thursday in June, when I came home from the yard to find that the armchair I had sat in for 22 years had been reupholstered in a fabric I had not chosen, and the conversation about it had apparently already been decided.

Each one of these things was small enough to absorb. That is how it works.

The architecture of a takeover is not dramatic. It is incremental. It relies on the other person’s own decency, on the fact that a reasonable man will absorb one small thing at a time because he does not want to be the person who makes a scene about a chair.

I began to notice the financial irregularities in the late spring of the year before that Thanksgiving, not because I was looking for them, but because I still reviewed the operating accounts every month, the way I had done for 32 years, and the numbers that came back in March did not match the dispatch logs Vic had given me in February.