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.

I have thought about Vernon Slaught a great deal and I do not think he is a bad lawyer. I think he is an average lawyer who accepted a characterisation from his clients and then went looking only for what confirmed it.

That is the most common failure in my profession and it is not rare and it is not stupid. It is what everybody does when they are certain.

He paid four hundred dollars an hour of my parents' money to fetch the single document that ended their case, and then he handed it to the judge himself, in a folder with his own firm's name on the front.

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.

She said: right. Thank you.

Then she asked me whether I had seen my aunt's new dog, and we said goodnight.

I did not think about that call again for two and a half years.

Here is what she had found out.

In 2019, my parents had used a power of attorney she had signed in 2016 — after her second fall, when everybody agreed it was sensible — to move three hundred and forty thousand dollars out of her accounts at Tillery Trust and into their business.

It was not hidden well. It was not hidden at all, really. It was done by two people who had assumed, correctly for three years, that an eighty-five-year-old woman does not read her statements.

She read them in the October of that year.