She said the apartment wasn’t the same thing because it had been given to her while he was alive. I asked her what she thought an inheritance was if not something a parent had already decided to give you. She didn’t answer that. Instead, she said my mother had convinced him to “buy her off” years ago. I asked her whether that meant the $410,000 she received when she sold it didn’t count either. She looked at me for a long time and then said, “You always were his favorite.”
I hadn’t heard that sentence in years. My father never said I was his favorite, and I never believed I was. What he did say was that he wanted his children to have different things because they had different needs at different times. In 2008, she needed a place to live, so he gave her an apartment. In 2014, she needed money, so she sold it. In his will, he left the remaining estate to be divided among the rest of us. That wasn’t favoritism. It was simply a decision he had made while he was alive and able to make it.
I showed my attorney the deed, and he found something I hadn’t noticed. My father had written a handwritten statement when he transferred the apartment, and the county had attached it to the deed. It said that the property was being given to his daughter as her lifetime financial provision and that he considered the transfer complete. There was even a line saying he did not intend the property to be counted again against the other beneficiaries. My sister had apparently filed her petition without reading the document attached to the deed she had signed.
At the hearing, her lawyer tried to argue that the apartment was unrelated to the estate. My attorney simply asked the court to read my father’s statement. The judge did, and then asked my sister whether she had anything that contradicted it. She didn’t. She had spent months telling everyone she had been left with nothing, while the public record showed she’d already received an apartment worth $410,000 and sold it for cash. The petition was dismissed. I still think about her sitting in that second row at the funeral, crying while the process server waited outside. For a moment I thought she had come because she missed our father. Now I think she had come because she wanted one last chance to change what he had decided.
