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 4

Now the part that decided the case, and it is not the JAG file.

I refused to write my grandmother's will.

In the January, about six weeks after that telephone call, she rang again and asked whether I could do it for her, since I did that sort of thing.

I said no.

I said no immediately and I said it twice, because she pushed, because she was eighty-seven and did not see why a granddaughter who drafts wills all day could not draft hers.

I told her that I could not, that if there was any chance I would be a beneficiary I must not be anywhere near the document, and that she needed a local attorney with no connection to this family whatsoever.

I gave her the two-sentence version of why, which is the version I have given to about four hundred soldiers: if the person who benefits is also the person who drafted it, then it does not matter how honest anybody was, because it will not survive a challenge.

She was annoyed with me.

She said something about how much money lawyers charge and something about how she supposed I was very busy, which is the specific weapon that generation carries, and she rang off.

I felt bad about that phone call for about a day and a half.

I want that in here, because there is a version of me in this account who is calm and correct and always ten moves ahead, and she does not exist. I hung up thinking that I had been rigid with an old woman about a technicality, and that I could have just done it and been careful, and that she was eighty-seven and had asked her granddaughter for a favour.

Almost every professional instinct I have was screaming and I very nearly overrode it because my grandmother was cross with me on a telephone.

That is how close it was.

That conversation is in writing.

Not because I recorded anything. Because two days later I emailed her Sowell Brink's name and address and a short note saying I could not be involved and that she should go and see him.

Eleven lines. Sent on a Thursday in January.

Sowell Brink had that email in his file, because she had printed it and brought it to their first meeting, because she was eighty-seven and that is what you do with an email.