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.

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.

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