The letter was dated November 2016, the same week my father bought the condo. She had signed the green card acknowledging that he had told her the property was her inheritance. But the response to my attorney wasn’t from her. It was from her lawyer, and it said she had never been informed that the condo was intended to satisfy her share. My attorney called me and said, “She signed for the letter herself.” I asked him whether there was anything else in the file, and he said there was one more document my father had kept separate from everything else.
It was a handwritten note from my father, dated three days after the closing. He wrote that he had bought the condo because he wanted his daughter to have something substantial while he was alive, and that he considered the $240,000 his gift to her. He also wrote that he didn’t want her arguing with the rest of us after his death because he had already decided what each child would receive. At the bottom he wrote, “She will say I excluded her because she will forget what I gave her.” I read that sentence and realized he’d anticipated exactly what was happening.
The hearing was in October. Her attorney argued that the condo was unrelated to the estate and that my father had promised her more. My attorney put the 2016 letter, the certified green card, and the closing statement on the table. Then he placed my father’s handwritten note beside them. The judge asked her one question: “Did you sign this receipt?” She said yes, but then tried to explain that she’d signed it because she thought it was “just paperwork.” The judge looked at the document again and said, “It says exactly what your father told you it said.”
She withdrew the petition two weeks later. She never apologized, and I never expected her to. Before leaving the courthouse, my attorney handed me the original letter and said my father had apparently known his children better than he let on. He hadn’t left his first daughter nothing — he had given her $240,000 six years before he died and made sure she signed for it. I still haven’t met her properly. But I keep thinking about the green card sitting in my father’s files for nine years. He knew that one day somebody might claim they had been forgotten. He made sure there was a piece of paper proving they hadn’t been.
