On my wedding night I hid under the bed to surprise my husband. His mother came in instead, sat down on the mattress above me, and put a call on speaker.

What she found is not complicated and that is the point of it.

An executor is allowed to pay the estate’s expenses. She is not allowed to lend it to one beneficiary, informally, for nine years, and record it as an expense.

Saoirse was told the estate was mostly the house and it’s complicated, and she was twenty when her father passed, and she believed her mother, and she signed what she was given at a kitchen table.

Imelda’s phrase for that, which I have written down, is: it is not usually a conspiracy. It is usually one person who decides they are better at money than everybody else, and then spends nine years being right about it.

PART 4

And now my part, because there is no honest version of this without it.

I was warned.

At the engagement party in the March, his sister pulled me over by the coats at the back of the function room.