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.

Who used one word about me for thirty-eight years, always in a light voice, always in front of other people, whenever I would not do a thing they wanted.

Difficult.

I read the filing twice, at my kitchen table, on a Thursday.

What I felt was not anger. I have been angry with those two people and I know what it feels like and this was not that.

It was flatter and colder and much more useful, and it was the same thing I feel when opposing counsel makes a claim in a filing that I know for a fact he cannot support.

The hearing was three months later at the county court in Ashbury Falls, in Marrow County, at nine in the morning.

I got there forty minutes early.

Navy suit off a rack, eleven years old. Flat shoes. A cheap watch. Two folders, labelled, on my lap.

No attorney sitting beside me.