Chapter 8 — CLAUSE ELEVEN

I am going to set it out the way he read it, because the wording is the entire second half of my life.

**Clause 11. Forfeiture.**

*In the event that any beneficiary of this Trust shall be found, by a court of competent jurisdiction, whether upon criminal conviction or upon a civil finding by a preponderance of the evidence, to have caused or attempted to cause physical harm to any person who is, or who would upon birth become, a lineal descendant of the Settlor, then the interest of that beneficiary shall terminate absolutely as of the date of the act, and shall pass as though that beneficiary had predeceased the Settlor.*

Voss stopped reading and took his glasses off and let the room have it.

Margot's attorney said, "That's a slayer clause. Slayer statutes require a killing. Nobody's been—"

"It's not a slayer clause, Mr. Ozick. A slayer clause is clause twelve. Clause eleven is broader and it was drafted specifically."

"Drafted by whom?"

"By me," Voss said. "In 2017. At Mr. Halloway's instruction."

There was a silence in that room that I would like to be able to describe better.

I remember that my daughter was asleep and that her hand had come out of the blanket.

"Mr. Voss," Ozick said, "are you aware that your client has been dead for six years and cannot be examined on his intent?"

"I am. That's why I wrote a memorandum to file on the day he instructed me, which is the ordinary practice, and which I have brought." Voss put a single sheet on the table. "Mr. Halloway asked for clause eleven in March of 2017 following a conversation with his son."

"What conversation?"

"I don't know. He didn't tell me and I didn't ask."

I said — and this is the first time I had said anything in that room — "How would it apply?"

Voss turned to me.

"Mrs. Thorne, is your daughter the biological child of Adam Halloway?"

"Yes."

"Then she is a lineal descendant of the settlor, and she was in utero on the fourteenth of October, and clause eleven says who would upon birth become, which is language I chose deliberately in 2017 and which I have never before had occasion to use."

Ozick said, "There has been no conviction."

"Clause eleven does not require one." Voss put his glasses back on. "It requires a finding by a court, criminal or civil, on the ordinary civil standard. It is, in my professional view, the least demanding forfeiture provision I have ever drafted, and I drafted it that way because I was asked to."

Margot spoke for the first time.

She had not looked at me since I came into the room. She had not looked at the car seat at all, not once, not for a second, and I had been watching for it.

She said: "Gerald never told me that was in there."

And Voss — seventy-one years old, four decades of reading documents aloud to people on the worst day of their lives — looked down the table at her and said the only unprofessional thing I ever heard him say.

"No, Margot. He didn't."