My parents sued me for the four point seven million dollars my grandmother left me, and to prove I was unstable their own attorney subpoenaed my service record and put it in front of the judge himself. He had read two pages of a hundred and forty. That is how my family found out what I do for a living.

PART 1

Halina Ardmore was my father’s mother. She died in the spring at eighty-eight, in her own bed, in the house on Colliers Row that she had lived in since 1961.

She left me four point seven million dollars.

Not a share. Not a gesture. A properly executed instrument, drawn by her own attorney, naming me and only me.

My parents filed within eleven days.

The claim had two halves, and I want to set them out plainly because everything that happened afterward runs through the second one.

The first was undue influence — that I had worked on an elderly woman and turned her against her own son banc.