Yes, that was the point. He was dead. Therefore, to Grant, certain protections had expired. Certain optics could be managed. Certain assets might finally loosen.
I set the banker’s box down on the hood of my car and looked at him with a clarity so bright it almost hurt.
“You know what’s amazing?” I said quietly. “You still think this is about who loved me more.”
His expression faltered.
“It’s not. It’s about who saw me as a person and who saw me as a path.”
He shook his head. “I loved you.”
“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.
I wore charcoal gray because black felt too theatrical for court and I had already done theatrical at the funeral. Blackwood wore one of his razor-sharp dark suits and carried his legal pad like a priest carrying last rites. Aunt Helen came too, in pearls and an expression that promised blood.
Grant sat across the aisle with his attorney, who looked as though he had aged five years between the filing and the hearing. That made sense. He had, after all, chosen to represent a man trying to argue that James Crawford was too confused to know exactly how much he despised him.
When the judge came in, everyone stood. Papers rustled. Chairs scraped. The room smelled like old air-conditioning and stale coffee and the cold paper smell of legal records.
Grant avoided my eyes.