PART 3
I could.
I had kept copies of everything in a manila folder in the bottom of my dresser drawer, the way Harold had always kept important papers, because Harold used to say that the documents you need most urgently are always the ones you can’t find.
Ethan spent the second day reading.
All of it, carefully, making notes.
I made him tea and left him alone.
Melissa tried to come into the back room twice and found the door closed.
Brian came to the back door once and knocked and Ethan opened it and said, “I’m working, Dad.
I’ll find you when I’m done,” in a tone that Brian apparently recognized as not negotiable, because he went back inside.
On the third evening Ethan sat down across from me again.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean exactly what I said.
Not what you think is realistic, not what you think Brian will allow.
What do you actually want?”
I looked at the low ceiling of the room.
The metal gutter outside the window.
The single uneven chair.
“I want to have my house back,” I said.
“Or enough of it that I can live like a person again.”
He nodded.
“That’s what I thought.”
What followed I will describe only in general terms, because the details were complicated and Ethan explained them to me more than once before I fully understood them.
The short version is that the documents Brian had presented to me were not fraudulent exactly, but they had been executed under circumstances that a court would find troubling.
I had signed without independent counsel.
Certain things had not been explained to me.
There was a question about my capacity at the time, given that I had been dealing with Harold’s death and had been prescribed medication for anxiety that I had since stopped needing.
Ethan also found something Brian had apparently not considered: a clause in Harold’s original will, predating the transfer, that established certain rights for me regarding the property that the transfer documents had not properly extinguished.
Harold, who had also believed in keeping careful records, had been more specific in his will than Brian had accounted for.
“This is actually a reasonable case,” Ethan said, on the fourth morning over coffee.
“I’m not promising you anything.
But it’s a reasonable case.”
