A grieving caregiver who ends up with control of the money is a familiar villain; courts are right to be suspicious of exactly that shape.

For a few minutes, listening to it, I understood that everything came down to whether we could prove the story was upside down — whether we could show that the confused and manipulated party was not my grandfather at all.

And then Raymond Steadman stood, and said he’d like to play a recording for the court, and the room went still.

Chapter 14 — It Only Made Me Quiet

The screen at the front of the courtroom lit, and my grandfather was on it.

He had made the recording eight months before he died, and he had made it properly — I understood, watching it, just how carefully he’d built even this.