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 3

Nine minutes after the judge said my name, the case had effectively stopped being about whether I could manage money.

Which left the first half of the claim. Undue influence.

And that is the half I want to spend time on, because it is the one my grandmother had already dealt with, eighteen months before she died, and nobody in that family had any idea.

She telephoned me on a Tuesday evening in November.

We talked for about eleven minutes. Her hip. A neighbour's fence. Whether I was eating.

And then right at the end, in the voice people use when they have been building up to something the whole call, she said:

Love — is a power of attorney the same as owning it?

I said no.

I explained it in about four sentences. What it is. What it is not. That it is authority to act on somebody's behalf and not a transfer of anything, and that the person holding it has duties, and that those duties are enforceable.