My parents sued me for the four point seven million dollars my grandmother left me, and to prove I was unstable their own attorney subpoenaed my service record and put it in front of the judge himself. He had read two pages of a hundred and forty. That is how my family found out what I do for a living.

PART 1

Halina Ardmore was my father's mother. She died in the spring at eighty-eight, in her own bed, in the house on Colliers Row that she had lived in since 1961.

She left me four point seven million dollars.

Not a share. Not a gesture. A properly executed instrument, drawn by her own attorney, naming me and only me.

My parents filed within eleven days.

The claim had two halves, and I want to set them out plainly because everything that happened afterward runs through the second one.

The first was undue influence — that I had worked on an elderly woman and turned her against her own son.

The second was that I was in no condition to manage money on that scale.

These are the same two people who forgot my birthday in 2011 and again in 2016.

Who framed my brother Dashiell's community college certificate and hung it in the hall, and put my sister Marigold's engagement photograph on the mantel, and have not had a photograph of me in that house since I was fifteen years old.