My mother’s attorney put down his fork and said, “That isn’t what the will says.” My brother immediately told him that he didn’t need to defend me, and the attorney said he wasn’t defending anyone. He was correcting a factual statement that had just been made in front of my sixteen-year-old daughter. My brother looked at him and said everyone knew our mother had favored me. The attorney replied that our mother had made her wishes very clear, and they were not what my brother had just described.
My daughter asked why her uncle would say something that wasn’t true if there was a document proving otherwise. Nobody answered at first. My brother said he was only explaining how difficult it had been for him, and I told him he was allowed to feel hurt without changing what happened. Our mother had divided everything equally between us, including the accounts, the personal property, and the proceeds from the house. There was nothing ambiguous about it, and he’d read the entire document before the estate was settled.
Then the attorney said something I had never heard anyone in the family say aloud. He told my brother that their mother had specifically asked him, before she died, whether he thought the two of them could accept an equal division without turning it into a competition. My brother went completely silent. The attorney said she had told him she loved both her children equally and didn’t want either one spending the rest of their lives keeping score. My daughter looked at her uncle and asked if he’d ever considered that maybe their grandmother had actually meant what she wrote.
My brother started crying and said he had always felt like I was the favorite, even when the numbers proved otherwise. I told him I couldn’t fix a feeling by accepting a lie. My daughter reached for my hand under the table, and the attorney quietly folded his napkin. Then he looked at my brother and said, “Your mother didn’t leave her more. She left you exactly what she intended to leave you. The only person taking something away from you tonight is you, by refusing to believe her.”
