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.

He also had his own attendance notes from three appointments, and a capacity assessment he had arranged himself with a physician who was not her own, because he is a careful man who has been doing this in Marrow County for thirty-one years.

That is what ended the undue influence claim.

Not my rank. Not the judge's face. An email in which the beneficiary told the testator to go and find somebody else, sent fourteen months before the will was signed, printed out by an old woman and put in a folder.

Judge Ferro read that email out loud. All eleven lines of it.

There is one sentence in it that did the actual work, and it is not a clever sentence. I wrote it in about nine seconds on a Thursday morning between two appointments.

If I draft this, then whatever you decide will look like something I decided, and I am not going to do that to you.

Slaught's only available answer to that was that I had written it precisely in order to be able to produce it later.

Judge Ferro asked him whether he was suggesting that a person had planned a fourteen-month evidential strategy in January of the previous year.

He said he was not suggesting that.

I watched my mother's face while the email was being read out and I am not going to pretend I did not.

The claim was dismissed the same morning. Costs went against my parents, and Slaught's bill was already in the region of thirty-one thousand dollars.

PART 5

I have not spoken to my father since.

That is not a stand I have taken. He has not called and I have not called and it has now been long enough that the not-calling has become its own arrangement.

My mother called eleven days after the hearing.

She did not apologise. What she wanted to talk about was the three hundred and forty thousand dollars — specifically, whether I intended to do anything about it, and whether it was really necessary to involve anybody, and how it would look for Dashiell's business.

I told her that the estate's executor is Sowell Brink and that it is not my decision, which is true, and that I would not be intervening in either direction, which is also true.

He did pursue it. It settled in the second year. I do not know the number and I have not asked.