He died when we were ten, before he could.
But he’d started a second trust. A small one, in his own name, separate from the money Beatrice controlled, that she never knew about, that came to Simon and me when we each turned twenty-five — which the lawyer found while unwinding everything. Not a fortune. But Kenneth’s own money, put aside by a guilty, loving man trying to leave his sons something clean. It paid for the lawyer who got us into that cedar chest. Kenneth, in the end, reached across his own death to help us find the letters he couldn’t save us from in life.
Beatrice and Rose are facing what people face when they conceal a child’s inheritance and intercept a mother’s letters for twenty years to control a trust. It is, the lawyer tells us, quite a lot. The drained money is a matter for the courts now, and the courts are not amused. I don’t attend the hearings. I’m busy.
