“Maybe,” I said. “In the way selfish people love what makes them comfortable.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Started over. “We can fix this.”
There it was. The delusion.
I smiled then, and whatever he saw in my face made him go still.
“No,” I said. “What we can do is finish it.”
I lifted the banker’s box, unlocked my car, and slid inside before he could regroup. He knocked once on the window as I started the engine. Not hard. Just enough to remind me how much he still believed access was a right.
I drove away without looking back.
At nine the next morning, the probate hearing began.
At nine fourteen, Grant’s attorney requested a recess after seeing the video in chambers.
And at nine twenty-three, I realized my father had left one final performance for an audience that still underestimated him.
Part 9
Probate court is less dramatic than television and more vicious than people imagine.
No wood-paneled speeches. No surprise witnesses bursting through doors. Just fluorescent lights, low voices, exhausted clerks, and the terrible intimacy of watching strangers discuss your dead father as if his mind were a filing category.