Or, “No, your brother’s lack of curiosity is morally relevant but not legally central.”
Or, once, when I was trying to soften the description of what my parents had done because part of me still felt disloyal naming it cleanly: “Miss Bellmont, if a trustee withheld access from one beneficiary while facilitating access for another, and then justified the discrepancy through values language, we do not call that concern. We call it selective administration.”
Selective administration.
That phrase steadied me for weeks.
When people ask what finally made me stop defending my parents to myself, I could say the trust documents. The legal papers. The settlement process. All of that is true. But I think the deeper answer is that I encountered enough professionals with no emotional investment in my family who looked at the facts and called them what they were.
That gave me back a kind of moral sight I had nearly lost.
One evening, about a month into the case, I went to dinner with Sarah.