Chapter 7 — THE READING

Wren House and everything in it had been left by Gerald Halloway, who died in 2019, in a document drawn by a firm in Hartford that has been drawing documents for that family since before there were cars.

Margot got a life interest.

That is a phrase I did not know in October and know a great deal about now.

A life interest means you get to live in the house and take the income from the trust for as long as you are alive, and when you die it goes to the person named next, and you cannot sell it, and you cannot leave it to anybody, because it was never yours.

The person named next was Adam.

Adam died in May, five months before I went over that rail, on the Merritt Parkway at eleven at night, in the rain, in a car that left the road on a curve he had driven eight thousand times.

So the estate skipped him.

And the reading happened on the seventh of November, in a conference room in Hartford, with me in a wheelchair because my wrist was in a cast and I had a nine-day-old in a car seat on the floor beside me, and Margot Halloway at the far end of the table on bail with an ankle monitor under her trousers, and her attorney, and Harlan Voss, who is the trusts and estates partner and who is seventy-one and reads aloud the way a metronome keeps time.

I did not want to go.

Voss's office had called me four times.

I told them there was nothing in it for me and I had a newborn and a broken arm, and the paralegal said, very carefully, "Mrs. Thorne, Mr. Voss has asked me to say that your attendance is not optional in his view."

Adam's own will was three pages and took eleven minutes.

He left me everything he personally owned, which was a car that no longer existed, forty-one thousand dollars, a guitar, and the contents of a storage unit in Bridgeport that I did not know he had.

Then Voss put that document face down and picked up a much larger one.

"We now turn to the Gerald A. Halloway Family Trust, as amended in 2017."

Margot's attorney said, "My client's position is that the trust vested on Adam Halloway's death and my client is the surviving—"

"Mr. Ozick, I'm going to read it."

He read for nineteen minutes.

I fed my daughter through most of it.

Clause one through ten is what you would expect. Definitions. The house. The land. The trustee's powers. A charitable gift to a hospital in New Haven. A specific bequest of a watch.

Then he got to eleven.