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.

It was flatter and colder and much more useful, and it was the same thing I feel when opposing counsel makes a claim in a filing that I know for a fact he cannot support.

The hearing was three months later at the county court in Ashbury Falls, in Marrow County, at nine in the morning.

I got there forty minutes early.

Navy suit off a rack, eleven years old. Flat shoes. A cheap watch. Two folders, labelled, on my lap.

No attorney sitting beside me.

I want to come back to the suit at the end, because the suit is the entire story and it was chosen that morning, on purpose, in front of a closet, in about four minutes.

I sat on the bench in the corridor and did not talk to anybody.

There were about twenty people out there. Two other families waiting on other matters. A young man in a suit with a rolling case. A court officer by the double doors. An older woman with a walker who had said good morning to me and asked whether I was in the right place.

My parents came in at ten to nine with their attorney, and my father was already talking as he came through the doors.

She doesn’t deserve a dollar, he said, at a volume that reached the far end of that corridor. She’s caused problems her entire life.