My stepmother called just as the day was folding into evening, her voice dripping with a satisfaction so sharp I could almost see the smile stretching across her face. She told me, with deliberate precision, that I would never set foot in the family beach house again—that every lock had already been changed.

Judges are trained, I imagine, to keep their faces disciplined. But there are moments when even discipline acquires texture. The judge—a woman in her sixties with half-moon glasses and the posture of a former litigator who had long since run out of patience for decorative nonsense—looked down at the printout, then up at Diana, then at Diana’s attorney, and something about the silence that followed made it clear the performance had failed.

When my father was called, he tried for sorrow.

He said he had misunderstood the scope of the trust. He said his late wife had wanted to avoid immediate family friction. He said Diana had become “overzealous” in trying to “protect the family’s use of the property.”

I almost admired the creativity of that last phrase.

Then Evelyn asked, very mildly, “Mr. Crawford, is this your signature on the occupancy acknowledgment?”

“Yes.”

“And is it true that you argued with Eleanor Hale for approximately three weeks before signing?”

He hesitated. “I don’t recall the exact—”

She held up a page from my mother’s note to her. “Would it refresh your memory that Eleanor described those three weeks in a contemporaneous letter to me dated July 14, twelve years ago?”