…I asked you to take our daughter if anything happened to me.”
I remembered that night. My brother’s wife, Anne, came to my apartment at midnight with her two-year-old daughter, Sophie, asleep in her arms. She’d just been diagnosed with cancer. She told me she was afraid of what my brother would do with their money if she died, and asked if I’d look after Sophie. I said yes, of course.
I thought she meant babysitting. I didn’t know she’d changed her will.
Anne’s will named me as Sophie’s guardian and the trustee of a trust fund for her. Anne’s family had money. The trust held nearly $800,000, to be given to Sophie when she married or turned thirty.
Anne died a year later. My brother, Mark, hid the will and presented an older one, naming himself as guardian and trustee. Then he spent years pushing me out of Sophie’s life, so I’d never ask questions.
Sophie found the real will last month, in a box of her mother’s things. She’d been planning to give it to me after the wedding, because her father had warned her not to “upset Aunt Linda before the ceremony.”
“Dad said the trust money was used for my college,” Sophie whispered. “But I had scholarships.”
After the wedding, I hired a lawyer. The court reviewed both wills. The newer one was valid. Mark was ordered to account for every dollar of the trust. More than half was missing.
Mark is repaying it. Sophie and her new husband put the rest toward their first house. At her wedding, she asked me to sit in the front row, in her mother’s seat. “Mom chose you,” she said. “So do I.”
